The State of Research into Human Longevity is Presently Far From Ideal

Fight Aging!

Do you want to live a longer life in good health? Simple practices can make some difference, such as exercise or calorie restriction. But over the long haul all that really matters is progress in medicine: building new classes of therapy to repair and reverse the known root causes of aging. The sooner these treatments arrive, the more lives will be saved. Find out how to help »

It is always good to see some of the important ideas making their way out into the world, even in forms that are not ideal. Here, for example, the idea that all is not as it should be in medical and aging research, and that far more could be done to tackle aging: "Scientists who study the biology of aging - the basic mechanisms of how our cells and tissues change with age - believe the aging process is modifiable. ... Even better, scores of peer-reviewed studies have proven that decelerating the aging process in lab animals also offers huge health benefits, dramatically delaying and lowering their incidence of chronic disease. ... If we could achieve the same exciting results in humans, we could transform the lives of older people and achieve what aging researchers call a longer healthspan. ... So what's stopping us? ... Putting a man on the moon was a defining national goal in the 20th century; in the 21st century, it should be decoding the biology of aging to find the fountain of health. ... Unfortunately, this potentially transformative work is a poor stepchild in the biomedical research enterprise. Older Americans tend to develop multiple chronic diseases [but] most research funding gets siloed into grants that study individual diseases, produce therapies that treat only one aspect of a patient's complex condition, and may add few, if any, very expensive months to life. Aging research has far greater potential to repay the public's investment than disease-centric research, because the best defense is a good offense. Getting at the root cause of a range of diseases can ultimately help us keep millions of people from developing those conditions in the first place. Although the National Institutes of Health budget exceeds $31 billion annually, the vast majority of those funds are allocated to research on specific diseases rather than the basic biology of aging, despite its potential to provide many preventive and curative strategies."

Link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-w-besdine-md/aging-disease-_b_837120.html