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Posted on Jun 14, 2006, 2 p.m.
By Bill Freeman
Aging sucks. Or perhaps I should qualify that by saying, getting older is wonderful, it
Aging sucks. Or perhaps I should qualify that by saying, getting older is wonderful, it’s the falling apart I’m not thrilled about. I’m sure many others can identify with the sentiment and in doing so we see the dichotomy of the aging process. On one hand aging brings with it the comfort of wisdom forged by life’s experience while on the other, it is a thief that robs us of our capacities and capabilities, leaving us wondering how, when we can offer the most, we are physically able to do the least. The dysfunction that accompanies the aging process is definitely a problem, and one science has yet to address in a comprehensive manner. One thing is clear however; our ability to reduce the suffering of the aging process will require the use of technologies that have yet to be developed, but whose development is thankfully underway.
The need for such technologies is great. In Canada, according to the Insitute on Aging, the cost of age-related disease is growing rapidly. In 1993, musculoskeletal degeneration led to costs of more than 20 billion dollars, exceeding those of cancer ($13b) or cardiovascular problems ($19.8b). In the U.S. over 220 billion dollars per year is spent on giving the dependent elderly some quality of life as they deal with debilitating conditions. In fact, in almost every country of the world, including even most third-world countries, better living conditions, medicines and other technologies has allowed more people to live to old-age now than at any other time in human history, creating a tidal wave of elderly whose infirmities will crush many already straining health care systems if the current trajectories remain the same. Developing technologies to keep the elderly healthy would not only alter this trajectory and avoid the worst case scenarios faced by aging baby-boomers, but at the same time allow for their continued productivity, enhancing the value of the time spent in old-age.
The benefits to slowing or preventing the degeneration that eventually occurs to even those who live the healthiest of lifestyles are obvious. Up until quite recently however, little was known about how we breakdown with time and how that breakdown might be avoided. Aging has historically been viewed as a problem too complicated to approach and “fountain of youth” claims made by purveyors of snake-oil have not done the field of study any favors. Despite these problems, the study of the mechanisms of aging, or “biogerontology”, has progressed rapidly over recent years and today, like many other areas of science, we find that we are no longer in Kansas and the accepted orthodoxy that aging is ‘inevitable’ is being turned on its head. An explosion of knowledge stemming from studies in organisms such as mice, worms and flies have begun to unravel the mysteries of how we age and more importantly, suggest ways that we might be able to evade the dysfunction that increases with time.
It has become clear that the bewildering array of different age-related diseases which the medical profession deals with daily, are tied together by comparatively few common mechanisms. For instance, over time, both the brain and pancreas cells accumulate indigestible “junk” inside them by the same process that produces the ‘age-spots’ we see in skin. In a brain cell this “junk” can cause dementia, while the same damage in the pancreas can cause diabetes. Thus we can say that in this case, the accumulation of garbage inside the cell is a common thread to diseases like Alzheimers and diabetes as only two examples of many related conditions.
This pattern of a single type of damage causing multiple types of dysfunction with age can be distilled down to the concept of “same mechanism, different tissue”. The accumulation of mutations in DNA leads to malfunctioning proteins and metabolic regulation, indigestible junk gums up cell processes, while too many cells (cancer), or too few (wasting) are problems all to familiar to the aged. Recent proposals suggest that there may be as few as seven types of cellular damage leading to the majority of age-related pathologies. If therapies aimed at these seven were developed, they could reduce the severity or eliminate completely the occurrence of many age-related diseases at once. This is a bold statement certainly, but recent events in science show it to be at least within the realm of possibility and that is all that is needed it to make its realization a goal worth striving for.
