Aging is More Than Just Named Conditions
We won't defeat aging in any reasonable timeframe by peeling out named conditions one by one - or tens by tens - and tackling each in turn. There is just too much there:
The dividing line between solemnly named condition and mysterious process of aging is utterly arbitrary; the "normal aging process" only really exists if you want to define it into existence. When you say "normal aging," you are applying a name to a collection of changes, damage, diseases and medical conditions, some of which have their own well-worn taxonomy, and some of which don't.
A recent piece at EurekAlert! makes a similar point, one I wish was made more often:
A broad study of adults ages 65 and older has found that half of them have one or more conditions that can affect their ability to participate in activities of daily living, such as bathing and dressing on their own. ... people with geriatric conditions had about the same level of dependency when performing activities of daily living as older patients with chronic diseases, including heart disease, chronic lung disease, diabetes, cancer, musculoskeletal conditions, stroke and psychiatric problems....
“The focus in medicine has long been on diseases, and how to diagnose and treat them. But that focus often isn’t helpful in regard to older adults; they tend to have one or more of these geriatric conditions, which are not considered diseases and can be missed by physicians."
Degeneration is degeneration, whether or not it has a fancy name and well-established research and patient advocacy communities. The overwhelming focus on naming and patching late-stage conditions - the results of years or decades of chained failures and wear in the overlapping systems of the body - is unfortunate, to say the least.
Dr. Westphal and Mr. Sinclair stress that they are not working to 'cure' aging, a condition that, so far at least, is common to all humanity and that most physicians do not consider a disease. 'Curing aging is not an endpoint the federal drug agency would recognize,' Dr. Westphal says dryly. Instead, both men say, they are working to ameliorate the diseases of aging.
It leads the medical community away from the rational path forward, which is to seek the simplest root causes and intervene at that point. Prevent rather than patch; repair the known forms of age-related cellular and molecular damage at the early stages without needing to understand the ever more complex chains of consequence and failure.
The scientific community and those who fund it could be doing so much more than they are at present to eliminate age-related suffering and death. That must change.
Technorati tags: aging, life extension
Well, that begs the question, doesn't it?
What, exactly, IS aging?
What if it turns out that the only possible treatment for "aging" is treating each degenerative process in turn, because there isn't some "mysterious process" behind it all?
In other words, what if there is no such thing as "aging", really?
Well, it's blatantly incorrect to say that there is no such thing as "aging". It doesn't take a biological sciences education to see that the average 80-year-old is less healthy than the average 20-year-old.
On the other hand, to equate aging with a "mysterious process" would be a capitulation, no better than stating that people grow old and die because of "divine will" or similar superstitions.
Aging is no more mysterious than the wear and tear that eventually makes a car unfit to drive is mysterious. The only difference is that the machine we're trying to fix is dramatically more sophisticated. The task remains, however, an engineering project, and like all engineering projects it will eventually succumb to a sufficient investment of thought, time and money.