Can doctors cure aging in the near future?

Will scientists, who are today searching for ways to stop aging, discover the fountain of eternal youth one day, and realize man's eternal dream of immortality? Or do the efforts being made in the face of aging show people a losing war against time, in an attempt to reduce the damages of the years’ work?

The French magazine L'Obs said that specialists in personal development, gerontologists and philosophers can help people to withstand the vicissitudes of the last stage of their lives, by saying that each age stage has its advantages, especially that the methods of "perpetuating youth" are just cosmetic tricks aimed at delaying the emergence of the inevitable. from him.

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Jean-Paul Fritz believes that aging without the appearance of wrinkles is a fantasy at the present time, however, it is legitimate to ask why a person suffers from a deterioration in the body that leads to “aging” and is there a solution and is aging inevitable, or is it a disease like any other disease Can we develop treatments for him?

What is aging?

The author wonders: Is it wrinkles, joint pain, burning head, and lack of vitality? He pointed out that what we see here in an old person is just a symptom, external signs of complex processes, and finding a single cause for these manifestations seems to be a real mystery, many specialists have surrendered to its solution, but others, pointing the finger at a series of criteria that together explain that we are progressing Age.

For some scientists, biological age is a measure of cell function, and it varies from person to person, and this explains that people of the same chronological age may not have the same biological age, which reflects the aging state of the body that various factors interfere in affecting it.

Characteristics

Carlos Lopez Oten, of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Oviedo, Spain, and colleagues provided a benchmark definition in 2013, identifying 9 characteristics of this "time-related functional decline":

1. Genetic instability due to accumulated mutations in DNA.

2. Short telomeres, the ends of chromosomes that seem to "wear out" with age, or rather with the number of cell divisions.

3. Changes related to the milieu and modifications that occur between factors that activate (or do not activate) our DNA genes.

4. Loss of protéostase, a mechanism that regulates cell proteins, and an important factor in the health of the body.

5. Disrupting the mechanism that allows cells to detect nutrients, such as glucose, which are linked to growth hormone as well as to insulin, and thus diabetes.

6. A defect in the mitochondria (the elements that help cells function).

7. Cellular aging (some old cells stop dividing) and can build up in certain tissues.

8. Depletion of stem cells that contribute to the development and maintenance of a healthy body.

9. Poor communication between cells, and it can cause, among other things, some infections.

No cheating with age

And many scientists believe that the aging process is unforgiving, and Fernando Colchero, from the University of Southern Denmark, says that each species has a constant rate of aging. "You can't cheat with age," noting that life expectancy increases in humans, compared to pre Industry, not to slow aging, but to save the lives of more children and young people.

The author points out that a recent study has set 150 years as a maximum human lifespan that can never be exceeded, so that once the “critical point” between 120 and 150 years is reached, the body will not be able to recover from the stress caused by illness or injury, and then death becomes It is inevitable.

Treatment is possible

However, other researchers do not see this fate inevitable, most notably the Australian Professor David Sinclair, who studies genetics and co-directs the Paul Glenn Center for Research in the Biology of Age at Harvard Medical School, USA. The theoretical maximum, which is assumed to be impossible to exceed.

For Professor Sinclair, there is one cause of aging and it is the root of all the others, so that the “nine characteristics” are just symptoms such as wrinkles, joint pain or diseases related to aging such as Alzheimer’s, he says, “There is no biological law that says we have to age, aging is a disease, It is the mother of all other diseases, and separating age from disease obscures the truth about how we came to the end of our lives.”

However - the writer says - that the roots of this evil are not located directly in our chromosomes, but in the processes that make our body activate or deactivate a particular gene, based on changes in our environment, but the regulators of our inheritance, including a class of proteins, play a role in both maintaining They "turn off" certain genes and repair DNA damage.

We may not have enough of them at a certain age, resulting in genes that were off going back, creating a cacophony in our genes, activating functions that should have been left inactive or disrupting others that should have been kept running.

"Over time, the wrong genes activate at the wrong time and in the wrong place," Sinclair says. "It's the loss of information that takes us all into a world of heart disease, cancer, pain, weakness and death."

The geneticist and his team say "what we need to find is how to regulate these genes and make them more active" because if we can do that "we might be able to delay all the diseases we have as we get older, and perhaps even reverse the aging process."

3 years earned

While waiting for an anti-aging treatment, some are trying to slow it down in various ways, among the most popular of which is diet, so that there is a lot of talk about foods that can fight “free radicals” those factors that are combated with antioxidants, but these diets have only a marginal effect. , says the author.

However, a study published last April in the specialized journal "Aging" confirms that we can reduce our biological life by more than 3 years in just 8 weeks, by adopting a diet and lifestyle that will work on DNA methylation, and 43 adults have followed This almost miraculous recipe, as they took part in a program that focused on food, sleep, exercise and relaxation.

Oxygen to extend life

Oxygen is not a medicine, but a treatment, which gained global attention last year, when scientists managed to “cure” the manifestations of aging using oxygen, so that a group of 35 volunteers over the age of 64 years received daily treatment in a pressurized room, they inhaled pure oxygen, and the result was an increase in the length of their telomeres. At the end of their genes by more than 20%, and the number of senescent cells in their bodies decreased by 10 to 37%, but these people did not regain the fitness as in their twenties, but the experience was promising.

On the other hand, the team of Marta Poblocka - from the University of Leicester in England - has developed a way to remove old cells from body tissues, which leads to slowing down the aging process, using an antibody that recognizes and sticks to proteins on the surface of aging cells, and puts a drug that kills aging cells. "We now have an antibody-based drug that can be used to help slow the aging of cells in humans," says Dr. Salvador McCabe, co-author of the work.

A few years ago, Elizabeth Parrish made a name for herself by administering a gene therapy developed by her biotechnology company, Bioviva. The purpose of this experiment was to work on her muscle mass, which decreases with age, and on shortening her telomeres. Promising, but the methods used by the company today are in doubt, especially since its technology that it says will "significantly" increase longevity and reduce the manifestations of ageing has not been verified.

Economic issue

Aging is not only a disease that must be combated, but it is also a major economic issue - according to the author - and a study was published this summer that identified the potential gains from slowing aging, at about $ 38 trillion for each year of age, says Andrew Scott from the Department of Economics at London Business School. "Targeting aging offers greater potential economic gains than eliminating disease alone," he and colleagues said.

However, treating aging as a disease is a big step to take, and if it succeeds, it could turn the world upside down. "I believe aging is a disease and it is curable. And that we can cure it. I think everything we know about human health will change radically," Sinclair says.

But then - says the writer - how can the planet feed all these healthy people who will live at least 100 years? Therefore, births should be reduced, or other sources of food should be found and without further destruction of the environment and biodiversity, in addition, only the very wealthy elite may benefit from this extension of life.

The writer concludes that humans can still dream of a world that provides them with a long healthy life and choose their own death, as Sinclair says, "The fight against aging is not about ending death, it is about extending a healthy life and giving more people a chance to experience death on better terms.