“Best Years of Your Life Are Still Ahead of You!” — how true is this?
Nobody looks forward to the physical realities of old age. When we imagine an 80-year-old, we don’t think of a vibrant, active, happy person. This doesn’t need to be the case — some highly functional elderly people have managed to avoid the diseases of old age due to genetic and lifestyle factors.
The oldest of these successful elderly are supercentenarians, living beyond 110 years. They are clustered in particular Blue Zones around the world. These groups share 9 lifestyle commonalities such as moderate caloric intake or physical activity (The Blue Zones Solution by Dan Buettner). The aim of geroscience is to understand, on a fundamental biological level, the molecular causes of aging and their role in disease and healthy aging.
The media and our aging family members remind us of what illnesses and infirmities await us at an advanced age. There is a long list of age-related diseases that plague the elderly — in fact the United States personal healthcare on individuals >65 years old reached $744 B.
Great attention is paid to the specter of Alzheimer’s, cancer, diabetes, and other age-related diseases — and quite rightfully so.
This leads to a sense of inevitability — that absolutely everyone will suffer these diseases. In the current state of affairs, there is a statistical certainty that one or more of the major age-related diseases will afflict us eventually. The question is when the disease will occur and how long we will live with it. In the case of supercentenarians, they may never get these age-related diseases at all (they die of rarer conditions like amyloidosis of the heart, or ‘unknown’ causes, peacefully in their sleep).
Preventing Cancer by Addressing Aging
For most therapies, such as cancer chemotherapy, we do not treat the fundamental cause. We kill cells after they have become cancerous. Cancer is primarily an age-related disease, defined by an accumulation of DNA mutations combined with immune senescence — allowing cancer to form and spread. Aging is the main risk factor for cancer — it’s not even smoking cigarettes.
Although cancer chemotherapy has advanced considerably since the early days in the 1950s, and we are able to cure some cancers (at serious costs), prevention has not been the focus. Screening for cancer more frequently and living a healthy lifestyle are a critical form of prevention. Another, potentially more powerful tool in the prevention arsenal will be therapeutics that slow down and reverse the damage that causes aging and by extension, our risk for developing cancer and all other age-related diseases.
This can be our new reality and to achieve this, it is high time that we start focusing on the single biggest risk that is associated with all age-related diseases — Aging!
After all, you don’t have to treat or cure all the diseases you don’t get.
