Near all work to date on the treatment of age-related disease has failed to consider or target underlying mechanisms of aging, the molecular damage that accumulates to cause pathology. It has instead involved one or another attempt to manipulate the complicated, disrrayed state of cellular metabolism in late stage disease, chasing proximate causes of pathology that are far downstream of the mechanisms of aging.
This strategy has largely failed, and where it has succeeded has produced only modest benefits. Consider that statins, widely thought to be a major success in modern medicine, do no more than somewhat reduce and delay mortality due to atherosclerosis. They are not a cure.
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The mechanisms of aging are why age-related diseases such as atherosclerosis exist. They are the root cause of these diseases. Attempted therapies that continue to fail to target the mechanisms of aging will continue to fail to deliver meaningful benefits to patients. This must change.
Aging doesn't kill people – diseases kill people. Right? In today's world, and in a country like the United States, most people die of diseases such as heart attack and stroke, cancer, and Alzheimer's. These diseases tend to be complex, challenging, difficult, and extremely ugly to experience. And they are by nature chronic, caused by multifactorial triggers and predispositions and lifestyle choices. What we are only now beginning to understand is that the diseases that ultimately kill us are inseparable from the aging process itself. Aging is the root cause. This means that studying these diseases without taking aging into account could be dangerously misleading … and worst of all, impede real progress.
Read more at: https://a16z.com/2020/10/07/aging-alzheimers-drug-discovery/
Source: Fight Aging!