The entire aging process in view

We humans are getting older and older. Interestingly, however, statisticians predict only an increase in the years of life, but not in the years during which women and men remain healthy. These "healthy years" remain more or less constant¹. This means that people are living longer and are simply sicker for longer - with foreseeable negative consequences for the financing of our healthcare system.
It's time for a rethink. While much research is already being done for age-related conditions such as Cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis or neurodegenerative diseases pursued. At present, however, science is primarily trying to understand how individual diseases develop and how they can then be treated. Research today pays too little attention to the fact that many old people in particular suffer from several diseases at the same time. Rather, it should become a research goal in the future to search for common causes of age-related diseases and thus combat the development of multimorbidities. This is what the author proposes together with 12 colleagues (in the context of a collaboration of a cost project² of the European Science Foundation) in a commentary published in the journal Nature from¹.

Only one more pill

For example, seven out of ten diabetics over the age of 65 now die of heart failure. It is not known why. More basic research is needed to identify such correlations. Together with other researchers, we are therefore working on the thesis that there are common causes of age-related diseases. There is justified hope that in the future new therapeutic approaches will be found that can delay frailty so that People stay healthy longer.

"The goal is not so much to prolong life, but to prolong healthy life." Ralph Müller

Instead of a patient swallowing five different pills, in the future it may only take one pill to help you stay healthy longer. Today, there are many drug candidates that are thought to slow down the aging process and could be tested. However, this requires new, efficient and suitable models: animal models, cell culture models and computer models.

Development can be accelerated

Today, animal models - even those for age-related diseases - often use mice that are two to six months old, even though a laboratory mouse has an average life expectancy of just under two years. Moreover, there are currently virtually no animal models in which multiple diseases can be studied simultaneously. New computer models in which therapy procedures for geriatric medicine and multimorbidities can be simulated are also important. They could be used to make a preliminary selection. Thus, only those procedures that have shown the most promise in simulation would be tested in animals and in humans. This would reduce the number of animal tests and speed up the development process overall.

Every person benefits

However, therapies that prolong "healthy life" are by no means limited to drugs. Also Nutrition, psychological measures and those in the field of Sport and exercise This also includes protective measures to prevent broken bones in the event of an elderly person falling. It would also be necessary for research to pay more attention to frailty and to develop new methods for measuring frailty, including gait analysis and new portable sensors ("wearables").

Zurich as a research center is particularly strong in the field of medical technology and health. ETH has expanded this area, and aging research is a focus of the Department of Health Sciences and Technology (D-HEST) with several newly created professorships in this field. With increased collaboration across disciplines, there is a chance to find new therapies that aim less at prolonging life and more at prolonging healthy life. The beauty of this is that because everyone ages, this is a research goal from which literally every person will benefit.

Source: ETH

Notes:

¹ Bellantuono I: Find drugs that delay many diseases of old age. Nature 2018. 554: 293, doi: 10.1038/d41586-018-01668-0

² Cost project MouseAGE