Better Antioxidant Systems
Via News-Medical.net: "it may be possible to use drugs to strengthen the anti-oxidant system in the brain as a treatment for presently incurable diseases like Parkinson's, Huntington's, and Alzheimer's and possibly other maladies. ... the new finding of a specific regulator of the body's own anti-oxidant system could lead to more-effective treatments for a number of diseases, and might even retard some of the effects of aging." Soaking up free radicals may be a cost-effective approach in this era of decreasing costs for drug discovery (setting aside the very varied effectiveness of different antioxidant strategies in animal studies), but it isn't the root of the problem - at least for age-related degeneration. The root is the mechanism by which excessive free radicals are being generated. As a general rule of thumb, long-term cost effectiveness is better obtained by heading off the root cause than by patching up after the fact.