Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Aging as a Disease
Currently there are two different types of research focused on anti aging. The first group consists of research to prevent or cure "diseases of aging" such as Alzheimer's, Type 2 Diabetes or Cancer. The elimination or cure of these diseases would create a longer and healthier life span for many individuals. A new branch of research has recently emerged however, that defines the aging process as a disease in itself. One of the pioneers of this new philosophy and research branch is Aubrey De Grey the founder of the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence Foundation (SENS). This organization is pioneering research in what Grey describes as “Rejuvenation Biotech”. The most promising research is this field involves the results of a cash prize contest initiated by the Methuselah Foundation, which offered prizes to researchers who were able to break records in mouse lifespan. The winner managed to keep a mouse alive for 1,819 days, which represents a significant increase on the life expectancy of mice in the wild, which is less than one year. The problem with this new research is that it will at some point need to undergo human experimentation in order be tested for use as a new medication or treatment on the market. As researchers near the end of the animal testing component of research there are many problems that arise with the inevitable human testing of treatment for aging. First of all the definition of aging as a disease is likely to spread controversy with regard to the ethics of human anti-aging experimentation. How we define aging is an important factor in how we evaluate the risks, benefits and beneficence of experiments to determine ethical research. The other problem with anti-aging testing is that it would require that healthy persons take enormous risks to help the population to avoid what might be considered a stage of life rather than a disease. One finally concern as we approach future human anti-aging research is the concern that the population’s desire for anti-aging medication is so greatly and the risks of the actual experimentation are so high that the temptation to force human experimentation on the poor and vulnerable might be great. I conclude that efforts at anti-aging are not unethical but that if anti-aging experimentation is to proceed ethically that it is necessary that we clearly redefine our definition of aging and that we take special care not to violate codes of ethics such as The Declaration of Helsinki and The Belmont Report in order to prevent potentially unethical experimentation.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/future_tense/2012/01/aubrey_de_grey_sens_anti_aging_drugs_and_clinical_trials_.html
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2 comments:
An interesting topic and a well-written article. I've got a few questions, though. Why would aging in particular have such a great "temptation to force human experimentation on the poor and vulnerable"? Would other diseases not have such a temptation? And if people want a cure to aging so badly, wouldn't they want to voluntarily undergo the risks that might be associated with a trial?
Also, I'm not sure that I buy your argument that "the definition of aging as a disease is likely to spread controversy." I think that the real controversy is not so much over whether to call aging a disease but whether we are justified in using more resources over the course of a longer lifetime.
Do you think that we are always justified in pursuing longer life? What if we live longer but are no longer productive members of society?
While the idea of targeting “aging” as a disease may seem to lend itself to wild speculation, I disagree with the idea that research into anti-aging therapies and treatments is somehow fundamentally different from research into the “diseases of aging” category. There is no reason that progress toward the goals set forth by the SENS foundation will require research any more extreme than what is already required for more “standard” diseases. While some proposals may be extreme, such as Aubrey de Grey’s proposal for preventing cancer by removing telomeres throughout the body (known as WILTS), most solutions, even those from projects related to the Methuselah prize, are much more mundane. In fact, the treatment that has resulted in the greatest aging gains in that prize is something much simpler than full body therapy: caloric restriction. Testing of such treatments in humans is obviously much lower risk than extreme examples such as WILTS.
When we do eventually reach the point when treatments such as WILTS are even remotely feasible, there is still no reason to believe that trials will change in any fundamental way. Aging cannot be traced to any single characteristic of the body, so any so called “solution” will be an amalgam of research targeted at different subsets of the problem. Much of this research will have applications outside direct applications to aging and will probably have originated in pursuit of other goals. Cancer research, for example, is generally not aimed at stopping aging, but it focuses on the same problem as the WILTS treatment proposed by Aubrey de Grey. As each of these treatments develop, they will eventually reach a point where they can be applied together to be targeted specifically at aging. The role of aging specific research is to both make progress in less researched areas and combine these disparate treatments together toward one purpose.
When therapies and treatments do show promise, the conclusion that research should adhere to standard codes of ethics such as the Declaration of Helsinki follows naturally since these standards should apply in every instance of research.
http://www.mfoundation.org/?pn=mj_mprize
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