Treatment of hypertension, for example, is treatment to slow down the aging of your cardiovascular system, so you can live longer and stay physiologically younger*. You don't hear anyone saying that treating hypertension is wrong, because we should just let people develop cardiac failure or have a stroke naturally.
I like this comment because it tidily makes what ought to be a fairly obvious point: which is that we already have longevity medicine to some extent. If a person has hypertension and manages to get it properly treated, it is quite likely that he or she will remain in better health longer than otherwise, because his or her body will not be experiencing as much in the way of accumulated damage.
If testing for (and treating) treating hypertension is basic health care for people in middle-age and beyond, there should be nothing too difficult about imagining eventually testing for (and treating) issues pertaining to cancer vulnerability, critical cell loss and atrophy, mitochondrial mutation, etc.
While the ongoing quest to achieve better health care for all persons is, and will ever remain, broadly applied and global in scope, it is well worth acknowledging that people get old everywhere in the world. This makes the drive to develop effective basic health care for older people of universal importance. Hypertension, cancer, atherosclerosis, etc., do not discriminate on the basis of race, creed, national origin, or economic status. And if we're going to consider hypertension treatment part of basic health care, why not other forms of maintenance care?
* One minor semantic quibble: Eventually I would like to see the words "older" and "younger" used only in the context of describing a chronological state. Older bodies are still going to be older bodies, regardless of how healthy they are. Just as the health care needs of thirtysomethings differ from the health care needs of young children, the health care needs of ninetysomethings and centenarians differ from those of younger folks.
In some respects (and I realize I might be over-analyzing things here...it has happened before!) saying that we want to "keep older bodies young" may stand to alienate the aged from the idea of robust good health -- that is, we must be wary of making "healthy" synonymous with "young". Older people deserve good health, and good basic health care (that is, health care that actually stands a chance of keeping them alive) as younger people do.
11 comments:
Yes, this is the key thing for me as well. It is important to stress to your readership that the conclusion one draws from this insight is not that somehow it is clarifying to redescribe the treatment of hypertension and such as part of an effort to "defeat aging," but that advocates for research and funding for longevity and rejuvenation medicine (or, heaven help us, "technological immortality") should instead be redescribing most of the things they presently associate with "defeating aging" as, simply, "healthcare" -- very much including the Seven Deadly Things at the heart of the SENS research program, and comparable formulations from research programs to come.
To be fair the idea of maintaining our current bodies as much as possible is one that perhaps may not be the wisest course?
The human body is constantly damaged just by simple acts such as breathing and normal cell division. While replacing or repairing damaged parts will certainly improve our lifespan as well as quality of life in old age it would inevitably be expensive, difficult to do and could lead to a whole new level of human society that is able to afford such regular treatments. And lets not forget that things such as space travel would cause horrendous damage to our meaty frames.
In my opinion we should not put too much effort into maintaining what nature has made and instead put more effort into completely redesigning and rebuilding the human form into something more capable of meeting the challenges ahead of us.
I forgot to mention this in my comment just now. I was looking at Wired and saw something that would certainly interest someone interested in longevity. Organs being grown outside the human body, in theory one means of helping the human body last longer would be to replace parts that have gotten worn out.
Quite right, much of what we now consider to be basic health care already has extended our longevity considerably. I know a 44-year-old man who takes medication for hypertension so that he will not die of a stroke before age 50, like all of his mother's siblings did. That one advance in medical treatment probably was sufficient in itself to double his lifespan.
In response to the previous comment, lab-grown organs will indeed be used routinely in the near future, as part of mainstream medicine. Bioengineering students can now specialize in producing artificial organs, such as in this program at the University of Pittsburgh.
your e-mail link is broken. Is there any way to contact you? You should post an e-mail address on the screen.
Eric, my e-mail link is not broken -- it isn't intended to be a link at all. Mouse over the "link" and read the text. Replace the word "underscore" with a _ character, and the phrase "you know the rest" with .com and you'll have my e-mail address.
I should probably have one of those "spam accounts" people often use as their publicly posted e-mail address, but so far I've not gotten around to setting that up.
(will respond to other comments later, but wanted to address this one now because I figure a fair number of others might be confused by it).
If you happen to have MSN too and use that as your MSN address I'm almost tempted to add you.
Dale said: It is important to stress to your readership that the conclusion one draws from this insight is not that somehow it is clarifying to redescribe the treatment of hypertension and such as part of an effort to "defeat aging," but that advocates for research and funding for longevity and rejuvenation medicine (or, heaven help us, "technological immortality") should instead be redescribing most of the things they presently associate with "defeating aging" as, simply, "healthcare"
I've definitely been going that way as of late -- basically, what occurred to me full-force recently was the fact that while some people squirm and balk at the notion of "radical life extension", practically nobody thinks that it would be a bad thing to have effective treatments for heart disease, Alzheimer's, etc.
And sometimes in the abstract I see people arguing that "old people should just lay down and die to make room for the new babies", but again, very few people make this argument about their own beloved grandparents.
I do think that there is some need to counter "pro-death" attitudes of the sort that would condemn the elderly to medical negligence on the basis that such persons don't "deserve" the same levels of resource investment as younger people do, but overall I think that talking about, say, SENS initiatives in terms of the actual physical systems they might help out with is probably a better way to actually get research support.
Gash said:
The human body is constantly damaged just by simple acts such as breathing and normal cell division.
Yes -- and metabolism is not likely to be fully understood at any point in the near future. I'm curious as to whether you've read up much on SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) -- there's a lot there that explains the logic behind the "rigorous maintenance" approach.
Traditional gerontology's business is to study how the body changes with age, and eventually that might lead to the capability to perform more advanced re-engineering of bodily systems, but in the shorter term, better maintenance is a good working strategy.
The engineering approach, however, says, "Show me the damage!" and then tries to figure out how to make the damage go away without necessarily having to alter the systems that produce it. There's no guarantee it will necessarily work in all areas, but the example of hypertension medication makes a fairly clear case for the notion of it doing some good over the course of a person's life.
I'm sure there will always be folks working on the "complete rebuild and redesign" strategy you suggest in your comment, however, today's middle-aged and older people can't wait that long.
The engineering approach seems more likely to lead to better treatments for things that actually affect people now -- e.g., heart disease, stroke, atherosclerosis, diabetes -- and I think it would do a disservice to people dealing with those conditions to just tell them, "Sorry, you need to wait until we finish Body 2.0!"
(And just to answer your other comment, I am not on MSN and not likely to be anytime soon. Plenty else going on!)
abfh said:
lab-grown organs will indeed be used routinely in the near future, as part of mainstream medicine. Bioengineering students can now specialize in producing artificial organs
That is WAY cool. That's definitely what I'd consider to be a good, positive, encouraging use of bioengineering. :D
Wired Science had a nice little segment on the lab grown organs recently. Theres a link to it in my blog somewhere.
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