An Interview with Brian Kennedy of the Center for Healthy Aging in Singapore

Brian Kennedy formerly headed the Buck Institute, but these days can be found leading the Center for Healthy Aging at the National University of Singapore. The Life Extension Advocacy Foundation staff recently had a chance to conduct an interview, and you should read the whole thing. Kennedy has an interesting view of the field, for all that he is largely focused on calorie restriction mimetic approaches that, to my eyes, are not likely to produce large enough benefits to really change the trajectory of human aging. Do you consider aging to be a disease or, at least, a co-morbid syndrome? I think you can make an argument that it's a disease, and you can also make an argument that it's a risk factor for disease, but to me, fundamentally, it doesn't matter. It's the biggest driver of chronic diseases, loss of function late in life, and has a huge impact on life quality and health care costs. So we have to do something about aging, whatever you call it, and I don't think it's so important what we call it; it's more important that we all agree that we have to slow down this process. I think that the regulatory declaration of aging as a disease could certainly have a positive impact, because if aging is a disease, then it's much easier to develop therapies and get reimbursed for therapies, so I'm totally supportive of that effort. I think that, however, we don't call cholesterol a disease, but we treat cholesterol because it's a risk factor, so the FDA does ...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs