Rethinking human “enhancement” in an era of sick-care.
If a person lives to be 100 years old, they are almost certain to develop cancer. Indeed, 96 percent of all cancers occur in patients aged 35 and older. This means that cancers are often not a deviation from “the normal functioning path of the organism”—and yet we treat them as abnormal. Human aging is not yet widely considered a disease, but can be perceived as the primary cause of suffering in our century. Scientifically, aging can be understood as the source of all the leading causes of death in 2022, including COVID-19—around 90 percentof all US deaths from the virus were patients over 60.
Economically, the gradual decay of our unprecedentedly long-lived populations costs the US nearly half its federal budget every year.
No…but when you are trying to get the medical community that is diseased based in their problem solving to buy into it, then Yes. Once we look at aging through the optics of a disease process, it then creates solutions. If you look at it as a “normal” process then you don’t go through an approach to treat, slow down or enhance. Another extreme question, Is Life a disease? Hopefully, AI will not come to that conclusion.
An interesting curiosity is found in the introduction to The Cure of Old Age and Preservation of Youth, by Roger Bacon, a Franciscan Frier: “… from the very moment of your Nativity, you make every day a considerable step toward Old Age, which is itself a Disease.”
Cutting edge thought these days, thinking of old age as a disease. The book was published in 1683.
The main effect of treating aging as a disease is that any anti-aging substance or therapy would be treated as a medicine and come under stronger regulation.
There are pros and cons to classifying aging as a disease… given that there really isn’t an agreed upon, measurable definition of aging yet I think its likely premature to talk about calling it a disease.
And, I’m not sure we even need it classified as a disease for the outcome we want (more therapeutics targeting / treating aging)…
Matt Kaeberlein has said he doesn’t think it matters (from the FDA buyin perspective) because whether its classified as a disease or not, you need to have some clearly measureable and meaninful endpoints that you are modifying in people’s lives… so whatever the classfication you need some good and generally agreed-upon endpoints, which we don’t have yet.
it doesn’t seem to be slowing down drug development right now - biotech and pharma can still used disease endpoints since slowing aging will naturally also slow disease occurance… so I think right now its all much ado about nothing. Things are moving ahead whether we have aging called a “disease” or not…