According to Science Focus, aging is the single largest reason for the suffering of humans. It might seem "sound counter-intuitive," although it's making sense when we think it through-all of the major killers of this modern world, from cancer to heart ailment to Alzheimer's, impact the elderly far more frequently compared to younger individuals.
Major killer is even observed with COVID-19, with the oldest patients hundreds of times more likely to die of the virus than children or young adults.
The said science information site also specifies that if we add it all up, of the 150,000 fatalities happening every day anywhere globally, more than 100,000 of them are because of aging.
Deaths from problems such as heart ailments are preceded by years of a physical drop, lack of independence, and more.
Instead of tackling the individual issues one at a time, let's go for the real advantage-the aging process that actually causes them.
Below are 3 of the 10 innovations proving that such an idea is not science fiction-from discovering the past to today's cutting-edge science.
1. Dietary Control
For thousands of years of history of humans, aging appeared unavoidable. Nevertheless, this dogma was reversed by experiments in rodents in the 1930s.
Clive McCay, a scientist, discovered that mice fed considerably below normal could live much longer than their compatriots whose food was not rationed.
And, essentially, they were not having their time as "rat geriatrics extended," they were doing so by remaining young for a longer period, delaying the frailty and disease of old age.
Essentially, people trying dietary control or restriction report that hunger is persistent. However, in rats, these long-lived hunger deserve a specific place in the history of aging study since they exhibited that it is possible to slow aging.
2. Revitalizing the Thymus
Just behind our breastbone and in front of our heart is, or, according to the age we're reading this, was a tiny organ called "thymus," which is accountable for the immune cells' production.
The drop of the thymus is among the reasons we are getting more vulnerable to infection with age, as exhibited by older individuals dying more frequently from flu and even COVID-19.
Here's the good news! There are multiple ideas to contradict the thymus drop, from gene treatments and stem cells to hormones and medicines.
One test of a hormonal procedure to thymic regrowth succeeded not only in increasing its size and number of new immune cells in involved participants.
Frequently, the impacts of treatment on aging, in general, are greater than the thin hallmark it searches to affect, although it is particularly remarkable that rejuvenating such a small organ appears to impact our entire biological clock.
3. Epigenetic Clocks
Epigenetics refers to the collective name for a group of chemical flags trapped in the DNA. This has been a hot topic in the field of research, and it has been investigated for decades.
However, what occurred as a big surprise to researchers was that observing how the epigenics are changing can give us incredibly exact approximates of our age.
According to the said source, "epigenetic clock" based on this notion could forecast how old an individual is within a couple of years.
More perversely, if the epigenetic age is higher than the chronological age, one can expect to fall ill and die sooner than another individual whose epigenetic age is below the number of candles blown on their birthday cake.
Instead of giving the trial volunteers a new drug and observing them for a decade, and observe how many of them die, which is taking a long time and is quite costly, a before-and-after epigenetic age measurement could be done after a couple of months.
This then would make trying new therapies much faster and cost-efficient, which, when researchers have got so many ideas for possible therapies that need a trial, will massively fast-track the progress against the process of aging.
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