What is the Goal of Treating Aging as a Medical Condition?

Thanks to a great deal of hard work and advocacy, there is now a much greater enthusiasm and public discussion in the research community regarding treatment of the causes of aging than was the case at the turn of the century. This is as opposed to continuing the past strategy of attempts to patch over the late stages of age-related diseases without addressing their root causes. Nonetheless, many researchers are still reluctant to openly advocate for significant extension of human life spans, and bury that goal in favor of talking about compression of morbidity, shortening the period of disability at the end of life. What is the point of the exercise, however, if not to aim high, at pushing out the duration of both health and overall life span by decades and more in the only practical way possible, which is by repairing the damage that causes aging? We are machines, and like all machines, our working, fully functional life span is determined by the degree of ongoing repair. Only when repair fails will we decline. To my eyes, failure to acknowledge radical life extension as a primary goal only serves to strengthen support for poor approaches to the treatment of aging, strategies such as calorie restriction mimetic drug development that cannot possibly produce meaningful gains in healthy human life spans - because they not not forms of repair, only ways to modestly slow damage accumulation. Life extensionism is a global movement with long-term traditions. The ide...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs