Has Aging Ever Been Considered Healthy?

Numerous scientists in the field of aging research declare their goal to be "healthy aging," which has always seemed to me to be a contradiction in terms. Aging is by definition a process of becoming more frail, more diseased, more damaged. There is a certain amount of politics in all of this, a result of all too many researchers still unwilling to talk in public about extending healthy life spans. Thus healthy aging and compression of morbidity become code phrases to allow these people to discuss the science of aging while pretending that efforts to prevent age-related disease will not extend life spans. Yet successful prevention of age-related disease must extend overall life span. Aging is an accumulation of tissue damage, and age-related disease is the result of that damage. Meaningful treatments for age-related disease will work by reducing levels of damage and thus extend life. An unwillingness to directly engage with this point is a part of the problem we face in finding sufficient funding and support for aging research to make rapid progress. The current research topic inquires: "Should we treat aging as a disease?" Yet, in this inquiry, the question "Can aging be considered a disease?" is secondary, while the more primary question really must be "Is aging treatable?" Paradoxically, the answer given to the second question largely determines the answer to the first. The perceived unchangeable, and hence untreatable, nature of aging is the root cause for many subsequen...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs