Proposing a Staging System for Aging

One logical outcome of a growing ability to treat aging as a medical condition, with therapies that target the underlying causes of aging such as senescent cell accumulation, is that aging will be staged. A patient will be assessed and declared to have stage I aging, or stage III aging, as determined by some combination of factors. The medical community assigns stages to many chronic conditions, an assessment of severity and progression that is used to decide upon treatment strategies. Like those chronic conditions, aging as a whole is the consequence of underlying processes of damage, and has a clear progression. In the paper here, the authors argue that the time has come to set up a staging system for degenerative aging. In the coming decades, the proportion of older adults in the world will nearly double. Older adults are a heterogeneous population, with many people over the age of 80 continuing to work and travel, while others might be weak, chronically ill, or disabled. A traditional framework for describing different populations of older adults is "young-old," "old," "old-old," and/or "oldest old". Fried's frailty phenotype is a similar three-stage framework in which people are classified as non-frail, prefrail, or frail. Proteomic analysis finds large changes in gene expression at about the age of 40, 60, and 80. However, these frameworks are not adequate to describe the different stages of aging and subpopulations of older adults. Older age is a risk factor n...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs