Assessing Risk of Age-Related Disease is a Hard Problem, as Presently Attempted

As is discussed in today's open access paper, determining the risk of age-related disease is far from a solved problem. This is true even for cardiovascular disease, caused by degenerative processes that occur in every individual over the course of later life, and which would kill everyone in a world absent other fatal age-related conditions. Assessment of cardiovascular disease risk has received decades of sizable funding, large studies, and considerable attention from the research and medical communities. And yet it is still possible to write a lengthy paper on the very real shortcomings of present assessment approaches. I believe that challenges in assessment of risk are a consequence of trying to assess risk based on factors that are only indirectly connected to causative processes. Aging is caused by forms of underlying molecular damage, and this damage creates a spreading network of downstream consequences, and further damage and problems caused by those consequences. A great deal of variability is present from individual to individual in this network, and so picking out parts of it may not be a good reflection of the actual burden of underlying, root cause damage. It would be better to assess that damage. To take one example, senescent cell accumulation is an important contributing cause of aging. It isn't the only important contributing cause of aging, but it does appear to cause widespread dysfunction in tissues and systems throughout the body. Measurin...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs