Fight Aging!

These days, articles in the popular, non-scientific media on the topic of treating aging as a medical condition tend towards being something other than terrible. This is a considerable improvement over the state of affairs a decade ago, and night and day in comparison to the press attitudes towards aging research in the early years of this century. There is always room for improvement, and journalists are near always ill-informed about near everything they commit to paper, but nonetheless the tone is heading in the right direction: that the treatment of aging is a project, it is underway, there are many competing approaches and opinions, and, given the importance of the resulting therapies to all of our lives, this part of the scientific endeavor should not be ignored.

For all the advances in medical technology humans have developed, there is one thing it hasn't been able to do: stop us from getting old. We've managed to extend the human lifetime dramatically in the last couple of centuries, greatly diminishing infant and child mortality and pushing back on disease with antibiotics and vaccines. But the general trajectory of life endures: once we get into the last quarter of our lives, our health gradually declines. That may soon change, as researchers focus on treating the diseases and conditions that plague us as we get older. It's not impossible that we might soon see medicines that greatly improve and maintain our health and independence as we head into our golden years.

"Until now, we've been treating medicine in this very unsystematic way. In a sense, we've been picking off the endpoints of aging, things like cancer and heart disease, without actually addressing the fundamental underlying causes that are resulting in those diseases. So what we could do by understanding these hallmarks of aging, is potentially come up with treatments to intervene in them directly. And that means preventative treatments, treatments can go in earlier and stop people getting ill in the first place."

There are already treatments for cellular senescence, drugs that target these redundant cells and remove them, along with the toxic cocktail of molecules that accompany them and contribute to heart disease and cancer. Using these treatments on mice essentially made the mice biologically younger. "It's not as though they were hobbling along in a sort of geriatric state, which has somehow been extended by this anti-aging treatment. What they found is that the mice were healthier too. So they got less cancer, they got less heart disease, they got fewer cataracts, they were less frail."

That's an important concept to get across. Most people, when they think of increasing human lifetimes from, say, 80 to 120 years, assume that this means we'll just be very old for a longer time, which doesn't hold a lot of appeal. But if we could live to 120 and be healthy and active until we're, say, 118, then that's a much more attractive proposition.

Link: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/spark/with-advances-in-medicine-could-80-become-the-new-40-1.6427495