Delayed aging is better investment than cancer, heart disease
sciencedaily.com
sciencedaily.com
Seriously though, I wouldn't want to live much longer if two major sources of pain and fatigue are still haunting us in our later years.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/10/08/230175345/delayin...
and the strength of that report, brief as it is, is that other researchers were interviewed besides those with the new publication in Health Affairs. The Health Affairs study, at bottom, is an argument for a change in public policy to have more funding of basic research on slowing aging. And maybe that is a good idea. (My bias would be to support that kind of research, as I am a good bit older than most participants on Hacker News.) Whether doing a lot of that kind of research will actually result in safe and effective means to slow aging and thus prolong healthy lifespans is the $7.1 trillion question.
People in the field expect it to take decades more to get to a point of safely adjusting human metabolism to slightly slow down aging.
Funnily it should be far easier to rejuvenate the old (very useful) than to slow their rate of aging (pretty useless). Aging is damage, and rejuvenation is just damage repair. See the SENS Research Foundation outline, for example. The research community already knows exactly how it could be done, since the root forms of damage that cause aging are well-enumerated, and it would only take a decade and a billion dollars to demonstrate that in mice. Full understanding isn't needed, only the understanding of what to target and how to repair it: a fraction of the knowledge needed to slow aging.
Unfortunately this is a radical departure from running a drug development pipeline. The therapies look like infusions of bacterial enzymes, mitochondrial gene therapy, and more exotic things. So it remains a minority position in the research community simply because of inertia, I think - it's so much easier to raise funds when you can point to every existing Big Pharma project and say "it'll be like that." This is how incremental, expensive projects that add little value continually suck up the majority of funding in any field.
http://impactaging.com/papers/v5/n7/full/100581.html
"Whether or not CR will extend lifespan in humans is not yet known, but accumulating data indicate that moderate CR with adequate nutrition has a powerful protective effect against obesity, type 2 diabetes, inflammation, hypertension, cardiovascular disease and reduces metabolic risk factors associated with cancer."
My summary of calorie restriction research is that it (a) produces similar-ish short term changes in metabolism and measures of health in mammals tried so far, and (b) is expected to have much smaller effects on life span in humans than in mice.
The present consensus is that 5 years in humans would be on the high end, as I recall.
The most interesting thing to resolve with certainty in this subfield is how the short-term measures can be so similar, how the expected reduction of age-related disease in humans can be so large, and yet the life expectancy outcome be so small. Should be interesting, in a post-facto sort of a way, as the time taken to figure that out will place us well into rejuvenation therapy territory, achieved through means that have nothing to do with CR or CR mimetics.
Indeed, we have some idea of the causes and cures for cancer. We don't know with much exactness the mechanisms of aging.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie_restriction#Effects_of_...
(For a layperson's list, see: http://sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research )
The actual differences can be repaired or removed without resolving any of the outstanding questions as to what they do, what their mechanisms are, how they cause further pathology, where they came from.
If you've removed all differences in tissue and not produced rejuvenation, then congratulations, you've proved that aging is a genetic/epigenetic program - and at a tiny cost compared to present investigations. But I think it's much more plausible that we'd see rejuvenation.
I'm not sure exactly what you're point here is but if your point is we can get somewhere simply by directly manipulating the observed symptoms of age, I should point that while, of course, there are observable differences between old and new tissue, old and young organisms and so-forth, these differences aren't simply "symptoms of aging". Rather, observed differences are differences in the stable state reached between the continuous process of damage to parts and the continuous process of healing to parts. Changing X physiological state while changing nothing else is more or less as ridiculous moving hands around on a Swiss watch (not researcher don't try this - boo cholesterol drugs). Physiology of virtually any animal is very dynamic and still, still little understood.
I thought Aubrey de Grey had already demonstrated that they were able to make long-lived mice in labs?
As to where the SENS Research Foundation is, you can look at their annual reports - it's all still foundation work on the necessary technologies at this point, and $4M/yr is nowhere near enough funding for optimal progress:
Study after study, as well as pervasive anecdotal observation, demonstrate the role of stress in aging and deterioration.
Unfortunately, reducing it for someone often means getting someone else to give something up (wealth, convenience, exploitative predilections, etc.). And so far, we've not been able to maintain such social cooperation where it has been established.
Personally, a large factor in my life has been noise. I've had some incredibly inconsiderate neighbors as well as some rather ignorant and counter-productive employers.
That's just one example -- anecdote. But studies continue to roll out documenting links between chronic stress and physical as well as mental deterioration. And "everyone" has observed a family member or friend rapidly look much older while and after going through a crisis.
On a personal level, I'd recommend that people remove themselves from out-of-their-control stressful situations at the first opportunity.
Everyone gets cancer if they live long enough.
Since practical immortality is pretty much out of the question, for now, I'll quite happily accept deferred aging, which would seem to imply generally good health longer and later in life, followed by one or more catastrophic illnesses in the terminal phase...
...which hopefully will be brief.
As to pain, why do you think we have painkillers and euthanasia? (Well, we "don't" have the latter, in Canada, really, but we will by the time I need it.)
I would much rather live longer and be generally healthy then die horribly and suddenly that live generally healthily for a shorter time then waste away for years and years and years....
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/07/130731093255.ht...
Not true. There are tons of people above 100 years old who die of causes unrelated to cancer. Obviously there are well known mechanisms that link cancer to aging but it does not mean there's a probability of 1 to get cancer as you get older.
I forgot the actual source link, but I remember seeing a publication showing how autopsies on young people who died of accidental circumstances showed tiny cancer tumors in their bodies even in their 20s-30s, and that simply these would not grow further because of the repair mechanisms being highly effective in younger organisms.
So basically you get mutations in your body the whole time. Not just when you age.
Living cells constantly attempt to repair "the inaccuracies" occurring over the course of life of a cell. Reaching a beyond repair stage leads to apoptosis, or genetically programmed cell death; in other news, the cell commits suicide.
A cell turns into a cancerous cell when some of the oncogenes (namely, p53 and, likely, p16) responsible for upregulating apoptosis become silenced, and the cell continues to live in a dysfunctional state as a cancerous cell. We do not know yet what excatly causes the gene silencing.
At any point in life, the human body contains a number of cancerous cells that it methodically gets rid of or neutralises, which is a normal process of life. Not every cancerous cell turns into a tumor and leads to cancer We do not know yet what causes it. Many people die of an old age and do not have cancer.
I'm not disputing that. I'm just saying you don't necessarily get cancer just because you get old.