Growing Enthusiasm for the Development of Geroprotectors

A geroprotector is a drug or supplement that either slows the underlying causes of aging or produces a greater resistance to the damage of aging. In either case health is prolonged and mortality decreased. Calorie restriction mimetics are the best example of the type, but the category is expansive enough to include well known drugs such as aspirin. As you might imagine of a class of treatments that includes aspirin, the size of effect when it comes to additional years of life is fairly small, even in those cases in which the benefits are reliable. Geroprotectors largely work through upregulation of stress responses, something that has much larger effects in short-lived species, such as mice, than in long-lived species, such as our own. Nonetheless, there is a growing interest in developing these compounds and bringing them to the clinic. Far more interest than is warranted, I'd say. If all of that attention was instead devoted to the SENS portfolio of approaches to rejuvenation, classes of therapy that are based on repair of the molecular damage that causes aging, then we might be moving a lot more rapidly towards reversal of aging and large gains in healthy life span, rather than towards the very modest, incremental slowing of aging that most research groups are aiming for. Repair and reversal will always be a much better approach to improving the function of complex machinery than a mere slowing of damage. To confuse the nice neat line between two approaches t...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs