Fight Aging!

To follow on from a recently linked article on the present regulatory state of affairs for aging research, below find another recent call for regulators and administrators to classify aging as a disease. Numerous researchers have issued opinions and position papers on the topic in the past few years, and to understand why this is the case requires an understanding of how regulation impacts the research funding landscape. From a regulatory standpoint aging is not currently considered a medical condition per se. In some classifications, deviation from normality is one of the baseline criteria, and hence universal phenomena like aging are not included, no matter how ugly the end result. In the case of regulation tied to the legal matter of whether or not it is permitted to offer a particular treatment, and in the US the FDA adopts an "all that isn't listed is forbidden" position, the omission of aging as a treatable condition is a big deal. It means that there is no straightforward path to commercialization of potential therapies for aging within the current framework, and this greatly raises the difficulty of obtaining funding for that goal.

Attempts to change this state of affairs are slow, expensive, drawn out affairs of official and unofficial lobbying. You can see one of the approaches presently underway in the forthcoming clinical trial of metformin, a drug highly unlikely to produce meaningful results in my opinion, but which is the thin end of the wedge when it comes to the scientific community trying to force change on the FDA in the matter of aging. The recent increase in calls to classify aging as a disease should be considered in this context: the word "disease" is just shorthand for "something that I'm allowed to try to treat, and can thus raise funding for." Now that slowing aging and the medical control of aging are accepted as a plausible, possible near future goal by much larger fractions of the research community, the regulatory straitjacket is becoming ever more uncomfortable.

In the case of the World Health Organization's International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems the situation is still all about money, but in this case the benefits sought are a little more indirect. Adding aging to the WHO classification scheme is a way to induce various bureaucracies around the world to direct thought, funding, and verbiage to aging in the context of possible treatments. This falls somewhere between an attempt to amplify advocacy for the treatment of aging and an attempt to expand government research funding, such as the National Institute on Aging budget, via existing mechanisms requiring adherence to the WHO classifications.

For my part, I think that striving to change the regulatory system from within is just another way of implicitly endorsing its existence. None of the vast costs imposed on medical research and development by FDA bureaucrats will go away if aging officially becomes a disease. The better way forward would be for researchers in the US to develop relationships with developers elsewhere in the world, such as the more advanced Asia-Pacific nations in which medical regulation isn't so overbearing and costly: commercialize elsewhere, and deliver services and therapies to the market via medical tourism. The result will be more new treatments, delivered more rapidly, and at lower cost. If the FDA continues to pile on the costs and time for regulatory acceptance of new therapies, more than doubled in the past ten years, alternative commercial ecosystems will develop. Not before time, to my eyes, and it is a pity that this process is not further along now. The best path ahead is to make the FDA and its ilk irrelevant, to bypass the broken system and grasp greater freedom, not to support the present bureaucratic suppression of medical research by spending years to slightly change its parameters.

Why Classifying Aging As A Disease Is Of Crucial Importance To Humanity

Most people have probably heard many times the idea that one can "grow old gracefully" and in a healthy way. This message is perpetuated by the fitness and health industry and pension companies love to show the image of happy, relatively healthy 65-year-olds who can finally escape dreaded work and do what they enjoy in life, for at least a few years before a period of serious disability and death. It is true that some people live over a century and delay many specific pathologies. I also agree that it is a more desirable scenario to die frail at 100 than earlier, but the fact is that what we define as biological aging is in itself a pathological problem, a problem that still suffers from a lack of research. While not every age-related change is studied, the damages can be broadly classified into categories, and specific biomolecular problems can be directly targeted.

While there is a small decrease in function between 20 and 40, the human body still remains "very healthy" until mid 40s when disease correlated to the aging process overtakes accidents/suicides as most common cause of death. Keeping the human body biologically under 50 years old would take away the vast majority of all disease, and even if biologically young people were obese and smoked, there would likely only be a small number of cases where these "unhealthy" habits caused lethal health problems. The problem with WHO and governmental programs is that these systemic pathologies destroying the body and generating ill health in the elderly are not yet considered to be a disease. I have worked trying to change this paradigm. Earlier this year I coauthored "It is time to classify biological aging as a disease", and Alex Zhavoronkov and his company In Silico Medicine have recently published a paper on this issue, to persuade the World Health Organisation to classify aging as a disease as a part of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-11).

When I was a child I was told wrinkles signified wisdom and life experience, but didn't impact one's health in any way. Nowadays my brain is wired to spot the pathologies behind them; skins laxity and jowls linked to blood sugar crosslinking and destruction of collagen, dysfunction of matrix metalloproteinases and subsequent extracellular matrix degradation. Wrinkled skin is not simply a cosmetic issue, as senile skin is failing to perform its duties properly, similar to burned and scarred skin. Many old people become easily dehydrated, are less able to cope with temperature fluctuations, and they injure and bruise themselves easily due to the loss of components making up the main skin layer, the dermis. Skin aging in itself is yet not classified as a disease, but lesions have pathological names, and photo-aging caused by sun exposure, which shares molecular pathologies with intrinsic skin aging, is considered a pathological condition. What is humanity gaining by this hypocrisy?