In general, health care has been operating based on “fixing” what is damaged, when the damage is already installed or before an acute disease. However, there is another approach that advances as life expectancy increases: that of prevention. It is not desirable (or economically sustainable) that a person passes perhaps a third or more of his life with chronic diseases. The objective is to prevent, anticipate, try to make the years of life last and in good health.
“Longevity medicine is a development project. There is no definitive practical guide or a protocol to follow. However, many of the basic principles are beginning to take shape. These include an approach to early detection by means the causes of disability and death, ”he explains Matt Kaeberleinspecialist biologist in gerontology and aging of the US
In the base of healthy longevity medicine are health pillars, and can be summarized in four verbs: eat, move, sleep and connect. “These terms cover the ideas that nutrition and diet, which include eating healthy foods in adequate quantities; doing physical exercise regularly and sleeping well; and maintaining balance through full attention and human relationships, are necessary to prolong longevity in health and delay the disease,” says Kaeberlein, currently executive director of Optispan, a company that develops methods to prolong healthy life.
Instead of focusing on individual diseases in isolation, health medicine is based on a systems biology framework to understand how the human body can work in the best way. Consider health as the balanced coordination of interconnected organs, tissues and cells. “Understand how they interact with each other and use biomarkers (molecules that indicate the functioning of biological systems) allows us Scientific American.
GEROCIENCE, Discipline that links biological aging with the functional deterioration associated with age, bases much of the longevity medicine. Key aging mechanisms have already been identified. And each time it is better known how molecular networks are underlying, connecting and regulating these characteristics.
More life. But regardless of this idea of making a thorough check that allows to understand more precisely what is the authentic state of health of a person and what biological age (not the chronological, but that linked to their organism) has, there are research that continues to test how to prolong life. In that field, groups of researchers discovered a treatment that extends the life of the nematodes up to ten times. Also how to give mice 50 % more healthy longevity. And now a treatment is being tested that extends healthy life to dogs. And what about human beings? The effort to control aging does not simply focus on adding years to people’s lives, but on converting those additional years into health years.
For more than a century, advances in medical science have contributed to increasing average life expectancy throughout the world. However, the average year of good health did not increase as much as life expectancy, in general.
To reduce that gap, the science of aging is increasingly focused on healthy life expectancy, not only on life expectancy. The first is now an important metric in the World Health Organization (WHO) and object of published research and scientific conferences. It is not about increasing the decrepitude period, but also living healthy and independently. And this has a sense not only humanistic, but economic: the number of people with more than 80 years will triple by 2050. If the health of individuals does not improve, the expenses of health systems will increase, and also those of relatives who must take care of them.
Aging is not a disease, but it is the main route of access to the disease. “Aging biology is the basis of most diseases that cause deterioration in a person’s ability to function properly,” says Matt Kaeberlein. Aging is the main risk factor for nine of the ten most common death. “Maybe aging is not only a risk factor, but a cause,” he says.
Although scientists are beginning to unravel these mechanisms, many remain a mystery. But in recent years there was a very marked change: aging is no longer necessarily considered an inevitable wear of the components of the body, but as a specific set of biological processes that the evolution programmed in the genes.
If so, it should be possible to find drugs that interfere with that programming, a central objective in several laboratories around the world that use computational and experimental methods to identify compounds that function as drugs for longevity.
There is more and more evidence that these drugs could also contribute to the preservation of health, and the drug that many anti -aging researchers consider more promising is rapamycin. It was approved in 1999 to suppress the immune system of patients receiving kidney transplants and thus avoid rejection of the transplanted organ. It is also used to treat and prevent certain types of cancer. In 2012, a study discovered that the nematodes exposed to rapamycin increased their life expectancy ten times, which on average is less than two weeks. It is unknown why it works, but since then it was shown that the life expectancy of very different animals, such as flies and mice. It is currently being studied in dogs and monkeys.
There are several researchers from various institutions that believe that the drug could be tested under clinical trials in humans. The Food and Drug Administration From the United States (FDA) it still did not approve any study, although the medicine is already approved for other purposes, because rapamycin was associated with a higher risk of cancer and infections, among other side effects, administered in high doses in people who already suffered serious conditions.
Researchers are also paying attention to medications that destroy senescent cells (cells that have stopped dividing). They proliferate with aging, and the hypothesis is that if they are eliminated there are certain medications (called senolitics) that could enhance health.
For now there is little evidence that these drugs delay aging, although they seem to have some beneficial effects on various animals in animals, including cancer and heart disease. As some senolitic drugs are naturally present in certain foods or have been approved to treat specific diseases, and generally have few serious side effects, FDA has already approved clinical trials with senolithic drugs against diseases associated with aging.
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