Extending Life Without Extending Health: Vast Effort Directed to the Wrong Goals

It is very hard to coax a damaged machine into continued operation without repairing the damage. It is expensive and time-consuming, the machine works poorly, and fails catastrophically only a little later than it would have done without all of that effort. Keeping damaged machines running is exactly the goal of near all work on treating age-related disease, however. Very few projects are focused on addressing the cell and tissue damage that causes aging. Anything other than repairing or otherwise reversing that damage will produce only marginal gains, at great expense. This has been well demonstrated. With the best will in the world, an enormous amount of effort has been put towards helping older people by treating age-related diseases, but near all of that effort has gone towards therapies that cannot even in principle help all that much - because they do not address aging, the cause of age-related disease. So we have marginally longer lives, but increased disability, at great cost. This must change, and the focus must shift towards therapies that address the underlying mechanisms of aging, to repair the damage and make the machine work well once again. That is the only cost-effective way to extend healthy life spans. Longevity leap: mind the healthspan gap Notably, the societal triumph of longevity is plagued with debilitating morbidity, accentuated towards the end of life. The average life expectancy - a benchmark of population health - has risen fr...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs