Using Artificial Intelligence To Help Us Treat Aging
Machine learning and AI can be leveraged to understand and potentially mitigate age-related decline
Aging as disease?
Yes, you’ve read the title of this post correctly. Aging, not age-related diseases, but aging itself as something to ‘treat’. Or perhaps, slightly more accurate, senescence as something to treat.
Senescence, or the ‘gradual deterioration of functional characteristics’, differs from growth (which is also a process related to the passing of time and age). The key word is deterioration. While functional characteristics can change according to different life stages, what sets senescence (which I will call ‘aging’ in the rest of this post for the sake of simplicity) apart is the decline of function — even for functions suited to the stage of life.
For most people, it stills feels somewhat unconventional to call aging a disease. The case, however, has been made a few times by now.
However interesting that discussion may be, it is not the focus here. In fact, it is not actually relevant for the point of this post. For our purposes here, it suffices that we agree that, in the vast majority of people, advanced age is a period marked by various health problems. (If you…
