Could the DNA of these ‘super seniors’ hold the secret to healthy aging? | Hacker News Reader

Could the DNA of these ‘super seniors’ hold the secret to healthy aging?

theglobeandmail.com

42 pointsfmihaila11 comments

"Healthy aging" is a oxymoron and people should stop using it. Aging is by definition a rise in mortality risk occurring due to the progressive failure of bodily systems. It is the opposite of health.

You cannot age healthily. It is an impossibility. If you are aging, your health is deteriorating.

To say you want to do something about aging by saying that you want to allow it to continue - but "healthily" - is to immediately engineer the defeat of whatever it is you then plan to do, because it won't be anything meaningful. The only way to address aging is to find a piece of it, a cause, and reverse or repair that cause. To attack aging. To oppose it. To try to end it.

Running around trying to figure out why some people have a 1.1% chance of living to 100 rather than a 1% chance of living to 100 isn't helpful. Yes, it will probably tell you something about how our biology works when it is horribly damaged, but why would we care about that, rather than caring about what the damage is and how to repair it?

So very much of aging research is completely irrelevant to progress in human health because it is misdirected in this way.

Yes, anti aging research is more interesting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SENS_Research_Foundation

Goes to gym, plays sports, active social life.

I'm sure those contribute to healthy aging.

> At 88, he hits the gym twice a week, plays on a curling team in winter and drives from Tsawwassen to Vancouver for Sunday dinners with his daughter.

Yeah, that seems more a cause than an effect.

The main thrust of the article is that being active and sociable might not be enough, that people who live longer may have genetics that protect against disease.

They contribute, but on their own they're not likely to add decades to lifespan or otherwise drastically reduce the risk of age-related disease and disability. An effect is clearly there, but it's just not big enough to explain the range of results seen. Much of this is likely to be a complex of gene/lifestyle interactions. It's known that some people metabolize saturated fat differently because of genetic variations, for example [1]. Likewise, there is a great deal of variation in physiological responses to exercise, for which genetic variation is a prime suspect [2]. To understand how dicey a lot of recommendations are, be sure to look not just at the average outcomes in the studies, but also the range and distribution. Abstracts and news articles often obscure a situation in which some get worse, some have no significant change, and some respond unusually well. Others spin the situation to say that everyone benefits from an intervention... as long as you include enough outcome measures that at least one of them improves for each subject and ignore all the outcomes that get worse [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apolipoprotein_E

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26767377

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25717010

There’s also the Scripps Wellderly project where vcf data is available for all of their subjects.

I’d like to start a collection of articles in which the title poses a question and the answer is actually yes.

My rule of thumb is that, whenever an article says “Is X the secret to Y?” that the answer is almost always “NO”.

That has a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

Unfortunately, you've been beaten to the punch by Ian Betteridge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

Ha! Thank you!

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