Such a process of rationalization has profoundly affected the field of medicine, and the way we view many health-related issues, such as surgery, hygiene, infection, vaccination, abortion, contraception, homosexuality, and many others. A more realistic view of things, though it can initially cause controversy by upsetting traditional views and practices, ultimately enables more effective and more ethical action. Rather, what the field needs to move forward, Melov says, are investigators who ask “sharp, hard questions” and can investigate topics when the tech they need is still in development.Is our understanding of aging still in the dark ages? Over the course of the last centuries a gradual process of enlightenment has taken place in many different areas of human understanding, in which traditional views have been overturned by new knowledge borne of reason and the results of scientific investigation. ![]() “It’s not a lack of money or a semantic thing of aging as a disease or not a disease that’s holding the field back.” “Research, along with the budget, has been steadily increasing over the last 20 years,” Melov says. When asked about the ICD change, Luigi Ferrucci, scientific director of the National Institute on Aging, said it was “a good choice” because it supports the idea that “aging has functional consequences.” Meanwhile, the US National Institutes of Health is actively asking scientists to apply for funding for age-related research. Saudi Arabia plans to invest $1 billion a year in research to extend health span, the number of years a person remains healthy. Silicon Valley, which has a long history of investing in anti-aging research, has a new batch of longevity-related startups like Turn Biotechnologies and Altos Labs. “It implies we can change our fate to a certain extent.” “It acknowledges aging and offers the opportunity to think there are things we can improve,” says Guo, who is researching aging reversal strategies. Ming Guo, the director of UCLA’s Aging Center, likes this revision for its accuracy-and its potential. There’s still an extension code for “aging-related” diseases, but rather than being defined as those “caused by pathological process,” they are now said to be “caused by biological process.” Meanwhile, instead of old age, the catalogue uses the term “aging-associated decline in an intrinsic capacity” as a diagnostic description. But if the argument holds, even if there is no treatment for aging right now, perhaps it’s enough if it’s conceivable there could be one in the future.Īging isn’t entirely gone from the ICD-11. This can be a confusing argument: there are diseases that aren’t treatable and “treatments” for things we might not necessarily classify as diseases. Others assert that if a condition is treatable, it is a disease. People of the same age can have strikingly different biological ages, based on observed changes like cell deterioration. Further complicating things, Belsky says, is that there is no agreed-upon point at which a person becomes old. Some researchers say it does not make sense to frame something that is a normal biological process as disease. Daniel Belsky, an assistant professor at the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, views aging from this perspective: “Aging is a cause of disease, not a disease itself,” he says. Taken a step further, from a biological standpoint, aging can be thought of as an accumulation of molecular changes that eventually undermine the integrity and resiliency of the body. But in 2015, the agency made the surprising decision to greenlight the Targeting Aging with Metformin (TAME) study, a clinical trial that aims to show that aging can be targeted head-on, by testing whether the diabetes drug metformin can delay the development or progression of chronic diseases associated with aging. ![]() The US Food and Drug Administration, for example, has said it doesn’t consider aging a disease. This issue, however, is seemingly becoming less of a concern as anti-aging research becomes more mainstream. In the years leading up to the debut of ICD-11, a number of researchers argued that linking old age more directly to disease would help the field of longevity research overcome regulatory obstacles, paving the way for drugs designed specifically to treat aging. “The current view that aging is acceptable is ageism in itself,” he says. ![]() But he argues that the best way to combat ageism is to tackle aging: facing the problem head-on by devising treatments to slow its progress. “I would really love to know the motivation, besides just trying to maintain the status quo.” “My question to the scientists and doctors who protested the inclusion of old age in their handbook is: What is so threatening?” Sinclair says.
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