OLD age can be seriously bad for your health. The list of age-related diseases is long and miserable, and as people get ever older, these tend to stack up. The ; some have many more.
The good news is that there are a growing number of treatments designed to tackle these conditions, and more in the pipeline (see 鈥淕enetically modified stem cells extend lifespan of mice by 20 per cent鈥�). One very promising avenue is a class of drugs called senolytics, which take out zombie cells that are a direct cause of ageing (see 鈥淎 new class of anti-ageing drugs has arrived 鈥� which ones really work?鈥�).
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For now, the only option is to treat age-related diseases one at a time: dementia, say, or osteoporosis. But the underlying cause is the same 鈥� the ageing process itself 鈥� which has led to calls for ageing to be recognised as a disease in its own right. Proponents argue that this would allow the development of treatments to slow generalised decline and tackle multiple age-related diseases in one go.
This might seem like a no-brainer: surely it is better to deal with the root cause of ill health than to pick off its consequences one by one? But there are good counter-arguments. At present, there is no established measure of ageing that could be used to assess whether an experimental catch-all drug is working. Developing one will take time, money and effort that might be better spent working with the existing system. And people age in very different ways, so it may not even be possible to tackle it, per se.
The authorities tend to agree. Last year, the World Health Organization did on adding 鈥渙ld age鈥� to its International Classification of Diseases, and the US Food and Drug Administration has said it doesn鈥檛 recognise ageing as a disease, even though it has authorised a that looks very much like a general anti-ageing strategy.
This is arguably the correct approach. It is possible today to run trials of drugs for specific age-related diseases that could allow or even compel doctors to use the drugs off-label for other ones, if they think it might help. The current system ain鈥檛 broke, so we don鈥檛 need to fix it.
