What Has Omics Data Taught Us About Dementia?

An enormous amount of biological data can now be obtained from any given study population, and at reasonable cost. The resulting databases have grown to become very large. The epigenome, transcriptome, proteome, metabolome, microbiome, and much more, are at the fingertips of every epidemiological researcher, at multiple time points, before and after interventions, and at different ages. It is easy enough to find differences in the data between more healthy subjects and patients suffering from one or more age-related conditions. It is a harder task to build upon that data in order to find useful therapies. Aging causes sweeping changes in all measures of cellular biochemistry, but few of those changes are connected to good points of intervention. Most are consequences, not causes. In today's open access paper, the authors discuss this environment of near unlimited biological data in the context of age-related neurodegeneration. Examining the differences characteristic of disease and then laboriously working backwards in search of causes and points of intervention is the polar opposite strategy to that of the SENS vision for rejuvenation, which is to tackle the known root causes of aging and then see what happens as a result. The former involves a great deal more work than the latter before the production of therapies becomes viable. What we have learned to date from the omics approach to non-Alzheimer's dementias More than 50 million people live with dem...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs