Where is the ‘Operation Warp Speed’ for Aging?
Aging Research Should be a Priority
As the 2020 election draws near, we in the U.S. are reminded of the issues that are most important to us. Perhaps for you, like most Americans, solutions to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic and affordable access to quality healthcare are chief among these issues. Perhaps you hope that the U.S. government will be able to accelerate COVID-19 vaccine development with its $10 billion program ‘Operation Warp Speed’. Maybe it will. However, if these are your primary concerns, then getting funding for aging research should be a top priority, especially if you are an older adult, or if you have friends or family that are elderly. As you are probably aware, the COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately affects older adults. In fact, 80% of hospitalizations from Covid-19 are adults older than 65 years of age [1]. Older COVID-19 patients have a death-rate far greater than the general population, and this death rate increases exponentially with advancing age [1,2,3,4].
Although the novel coronavirus may be your top concern at this time, I suggest you turn your attention to an underlying disease process ubiquitous in humans that receives far less attention: aging. If we could treat aging itself, the effects of this pandemic would certainly be muted.
I suggest you turn your attention to an underlying disease process ubiquitous in humans that receives far less attention: aging.
Sure we want quality healthcare and vaccines for Covid-19, but why is it that in the 21st century, the elderly in the developed world are still at the greatest risk of mortality and morbidity not just from COVID, but from most diseases, including neurodegenerative diseases, cardiovascular illnesses, and cancer? [5] The reason seems fairly obvious. It is because aging itself is not being treated as a disease, and therefore research to develop aging therapies is not getting the attention and funding that it deserves.
The reason that our aging populations are particularly vulnerable to disease is because biological aging causes chronic aberrant and deleterious systemic processes, such as inflammaging (chronic inflammation with increased age) and immunosenescence (weakening of immune function with increased age), which are implicated in the disproportionate COVID-19 mortality rates in the elderly [1]. Fighting aging is an issue that is conspicuously absent from presidential platforms and the public theater, yet it is critically urgent that we come together as a species to advocate for funding to address the greatest risk factor for illness and death: aging itself.
Aging is a Disease and There is Evidence That it May Be Treatable
To an outside observer, aging has a fairly obvious phenotype: Hair graying and thinning, and skin wrinkling beginning in our third and fourth decades of life, tooth decay and the need for glasses in our fourth, fifth, and sixth decades of life, and age spots, loss of muscle tone and strength, diminished height, and aches and pains in the decades after that. We all know that these unwanted changes occur as we age, and yet we do not talk about aging as though it is a disease.
To the medical professional, aging is more than these readily observable traits. From a medical perspective, aging is the greatest risk factor for diseases that affect every organ and body system. With advancing age, the risk increases dramatically for: cardio-vascular disease which can lead to strokes, heart attacks, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), infections and aberrant and ineffective immune responses [4], eye diseases such as macular degeneration, glaucoma, and cataracts, cancer, kidney disease, liver disease, Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, and cognitive decline, frailty (muscle atrophy and osteoporosis), inflammatory syndromes such as gout and arthritis, and metabolic syndromes such as diabetes [6, 7].
The current medical approach is to treat each age-related disease as it occurs, and to prevent them as much as possible with a healthy life-style and exercise. While this has some benefit, it is an approach which is ultimately doomed to failure, as the most significant cause of each of these diseases, aging, is still going untreated. If you walk into a doctor’s office at the age of 65 and complain that you are old with a laundry list of age-related problems, the doctor may be able to help with some of your symptoms, but will have nothing to offer you to treat their underlying cause.
Appropriate funding and attention should be given to research in gerontology, the study of aging, but instead the issue is being sidelined while it continues to wreak havoc on humanity. Aging should be treated like any other disease, since the biological underpinnings of aging are becoming better understood every day and potential therapies are being investigated, albeit slowly.
Interested in the biological causes of aging? Read my follow-up article, “What causes aging? How Much Have we Learned in Recent Years?”
References:
[1] Mueller, A. L., McNamara, M. S., & Sinclair, D. A. (2020). Why does COVID-19 disproportionately affect older people?. Aging, 12(10), 9959–9981. https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.103344
[2] Roser, M., Ritchie, H., Ortiz-Ospina, E., and Hasell, J. (2020) Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19). Published online at OurWorldInData.org. https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus
[3] Onder G, Rezza G, Brusaferro S. (2020) Case-Fatality Rate and Characteristics of Patients Dying in Relation to COVID-19 in Italy. JAMA. doi:10.1001/jama.2020.4683.
[4] The Epidemiological Characteristics of an Outbreak of 2019 Novel Coronavirus Diseases (COVID-19) — China, 2020. The Novel Coronavirus Pneumonia Emergency Response Epidemiology Team. Chinese CDC Weekly. https://cdn.onb.it/2020/03/COVID-19.pdf.pdf.
[5] Niccoli T, Partridge L. Ageing as a risk factor for disease. Curr Biol. 2012;22(17):R741-R752. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2012.07.024
[6] Franceschi, C., Garagnani, P., Morsiani, C., Conte, M., Santoro, A., Grignolio, A., Monti, D., Capri, M., & Salvioli, S. (2018). The Continuum of Aging and Age-Related Diseases: Common Mechanisms but Different Rates. Frontiers in medicine, 5, 61. https://doi.org/10.3389/fmed.2018.00061
[7] López-Otín, C., Blasco, M. A., Partridge, L., Serrano, M., & Kroemer, G. (2013). The hallmarks of aging. Cell, 153(6), 1194–1217. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2013.05.039
