Theodore C. Goldsmith - Anti-Aging Medicine: How We Can Extend Lifespan and Live Longer and Healthier Lives

Would you like to live a longer, healthier, and happier life?

For centuries it was widely thought that aging was an unavoidable and untreatable aspect of life. We can find treatments for highly age-related diseases such as cancer and heart disease but aging and death of old age was inevitable, a law of nature. Many people still think of human aging as the sort of inescapable gradual deterioration we see in automobiles, bridges, and other inanimate objects.

However, today there is extensive evidence and new theoretical support for the idea that aging is itself a treatable condition and can be generally delayed by anti-aging agents as well as lifestyle choices such as diet and exercise. Substantially funded research is now underway to find and develop those agents and protocols.

The reader may be surprised to read that going into the 21 st Century there was no wide scientific agreement regarding even the general nature of aging despite decades of spectacular progress in medicine. After all, highly age-related diseases were the major cause of death and health care expense in developed countries and we cant really understand these diseases without understanding aging. Surely by the year 2000 we would have definitively determined how and why we age!

Today there is still major scientific disagreement regarding even the fundamental nature of aging and the reasons for this will be discussed in detail. Dramatic and some rather recent advances in genetics science have significantly altered modern evolution theories and dependent aging theories.

This book deals with two different questions:

First: Why do we age? This is the single most important unresolved scientific question of our time and the answer could substantially affect the lives of billions of people! Dependent questions include: Is aging itself treatable or untreatable? Is generally extending human lifespan possible or impossible? There are many theories of biological aging and they point in very different directions regarding these issues.

Second: What can we personally do in order to live longer, healthier, more productive, and happier lives? Are their medications, diets, and exercise regimens that help with this effort? How should we proceed with an anti-aging regimen? How does an anti-aging effort relate to our existing health care?

Before we proceed, we should review some terminology:

Lifetime refers to the time any particular human or other organism lives.

Lifespan refers to the internally determined time a member of a particular species would typically live in the absence of external limitations such as infectious diseases, injuries, predators, food supply, habitat, or harsh environmental conditions, e.g., zoo conditions.

An age-related disease is one in which incidence drastically increases with age. For example, cancer is more than 1000 times as likely to kill you at age 70 as at age 20. Heart disease, and stroke are also highly age-related and Alzheimers disease is essentially unknown in young people.

Age-related conditions are more universal in older people and include hair and skin changes, loss of muscle mass and strength, and general sensory deterioration including balance.

Anti-aging medicine has multiple interpretations. Cosmetic medicine can include delaying the visual appearance of aging with treatments such as Botox, wrinkle crme, and face lifts, and will not be further discussed here.

Healthy aging (sometimes described as better aging or aging gracefully ) refers to extending the active and productive portion of a lifetime without necessarily increasing total lifetime. Most people would like to reduce the length of the nursing-home-stage in favor of a longer productive and more enjoyable life.

Finally, lifespan extension refers to generally delaying aging, increasing both the healthy and total lifetime and therefore essentially includes healthy aging. Aging is itself a treatable condition. Aging is functionally like a disease as opposed to an unalterable aspect of life.

This book describes the history and main controversies regarding the nature of and especially the treatability of aging and concentrates on current theories, medical research developments, and developments in the practice of anti-aging medicine.

For most of human history, aging was much less important to human health and well-being because most people died at relatively young ages from infant mortality, injuries, and infectious diseases. Today dramatic improvements in medicine, health care, and general safety have resulted in a situation where most people in developed countries die of aging or diseases mainly or even exclusively caused by aging.

Aging Theory Overview

Theories of biological aging (senescence) are important to medical research on aging and age-related diseases and conditions because aging and associated symptoms are difficult subjects for research and theories can help guide research directions. Of course, an incorrect theory might substantially hinder research!

Among those who study aging ( gerontologists ) there is now wide agreement that aging is a trait or inherited organism design characteristic that has been determined in some way by the evolution process. Therefore, evolution theory and specifically the relationship between the evolution process and the aging trait are critical to medical research on aging and related symptoms. Modern evolutionary aging theories are based on slightly different minor modifications to Darwins survival-of-the-fittest concept. Unresolved scientific arguments regarding the mechanics of evolution and the evolutionary nature of aging have existed at some level since Darwins theory was introduced (1859) and continue today.

A key aspect of evolution theory is that it applies to all living organisms and was derived from Darwins comparative observations of many different animal and plant species.

Although there is still major religious opposition there is now wide scientific agreement on most aspects of evolution: All species are substantially related to each other. Humans are mammals and are even more closely related to other mammals. Current species are descended from earlier, different, species, that were descended from still earlier species, that were originally descended from a single one-cell species billions of years ago. Every day somebody somewhere makes discoveries (especially in genetics) that confirm these aspects.

There is also wide agreement with Darwins ideas that the evolution process is capable of distinguishing between tiny differences in an organisms ability to survive and reproduce and that current complex organisms are the accumulative result of billions of years of tiny advances.

Current disagreements about evolution concern obscure details of the evolution process that only affect a few observations and are therefore frequently not even mentioned in introductory biology courses. However, these unresolved details are essential to and essentially determine dependent aging theories. Scientific disagreements about the nature of aging are actually disagreements about the nature of evolution!