Aging and age related diseases
I think it is important for serious money to be put into fixing the problems of aging, aging needs to have the same stature as other diseases such as Cancer, Heart Disease and Alzheimer’s. These other disease are all aging related diseases as the number one indicator of whether you are likely to die of one of these diseases is age. By making inroads into reversing the effects of aging, the likelihood of getting these other diseases will all decrease.
Recently discover magazine did an article on whether we can cure aging. In this article they choose to focus in on inflammation and try and identify it as a leading cause of aging, but one thing is certain with aging, there are various factors at play. However inflammation does seem to underlie many chronic illnesses such as diabetes, atherosclerosis, Alzheimer’s, and heart disease. One example of this is when Russell Tracy identified that protein CRP (an inflammation protein) is a very accurate predictor of a future heart attack.
One quote stood out from the discover article:
Researchers are also looking at new uses for old drugs—trying to prevent Alzheimer’s using ibuprofen, for example. “The research is really to prevent the chronic debilitating diseases of aging,” says Nir Barzilai, a molecular geneticist and director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. “But if I develop a drug, it will have a side effect, which is that you will live longer.”
Aging should not be relegated to a side effect, when it is the main cause of these terrible diseases, and it seems odd that an institute called the Institute for Aging Research does not have longer life as ones of its primary goals. Many people think that curing Cancer would be a wonderful thing (and it would be) but even if you did this everyone would die a few short years afterwards of Heart Disease, or Alzheimer’s or other aging related diseases.
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