Anti-aging research has on the raising recently. However, comparing with researches on other disease areas, such as cancer or cardiovascular diseases, researching on aging is less clearly defined and suffers from lacking defined molecular targets and mechanisms.  To start with, there is no clear definition for aging as a disease.

Is aging a disease? If the answer is yes, why everyone gets it? If the answer if not, why do we need to research and treat it?

Aging is definitly a naturely occuring process. Such process could have started when we are born and becomes dominated when we get old.  Is it enough to define aging a natural process than a disease? Not that soon.  Since we don’t know what a “natural aging process” is, we can not decide if the aging process that occured inside eveuryone’s body is “natural”.  The only way to determine if an aging process is natural is by comparising historical record. The human life expectancy has signifcantly increased in the last centry, from aroung 50 to 70. That means, if one lived upto 50 years old and died “naturally” 100 years ago, his aging process would be considered “natural” then. However, if he lives today, we would consider his death is “premature” and his aging process would be “un-natural”.  Since we do not know what is the maximum life expectancy of human being, if there is one, it would be safe to assume that everyone is living with an “accelerated” aging process. By that assumption, the “accelerated” aging process we are experiencing is not natural and is a disease. Such “accelerated” aging process should and could be treated.

That is not the end of the discussion yet. Very small percentation of people actually died naturally (that means no obvious disease found). Most of us will likely die from one or another disease. Therefore, there is a reason to assume that “aging process” is not a disease by itself  but a “condition” for diseases to occure.  If so, treatment for aging would be different from treating a well defined disease such as infection or cancer.

So, putting all the thoughts together, we might be able to give anti-aging research the following definition:

“Anti-aging research and treatment is to prevent and reverse accelerated aging process and to improve the health conditions against other diseases.”

Does that make any sense to you?