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Insight into the Machinations of Classifying Aging as a Disease


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Posted 02 September 2015 - 01:23 PM


The open access paper quoted here provides some insight into present attempts to change the regulatory classification of aging in the lab and the clinic: the prospect for meaningful progress in the science is real, but regulation is holding things back, which is why so many articles have appeared of late on whether or not aging is a disease.

The bureaucracy of what is and is not officially a disease is baroque and slow-moving, a many-faceted entity with areas of different importance depending on whether clinical medicine or research or translation or funding is being considered. There is considerable interest at the present time in doing something about that fact that aging is generally not accepted to be a treatable medical condition in most parts of the system that matter, which is to say those relating to the flow of money into early stage and translational research. That flow of money is tiny at this time; there is very little support for developing any of the clear paths towards treating aging as a medical condition, and this has a lot to do with regulatory barriers. If it is illegal to treat aging, none of the big for-profit concerns are going to go all in on building potential therapies, for example.

Aging is a complex continuous multifactorial process leading to loss of function and crystalizing into the many age-related diseases. Here, we explore the arguments for classifying aging as a disease in the context of the upcoming World Health Organization's (WHO)'s 11th International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-11), expected to be finalized in 2018. We hypothesize that classifying aging as a disease will result in new approaches and business models for addressing aging as a treatable condition, which will lead to both economic and healthcare benefits for all stakeholders. Classification of aging as a disease may lead to more efficient allocation of resources by enabling funding bodies and other stakeholders to use quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) and healthy-years equivalent (HYE) as metrics when evaluating both research and clinical programs. We propose forming a Task Force to interface the WHO in order to develop a multidisciplinary framework for classifying aging as a disease

The recognition of a condition or a chronic process as a disease is an important milestone for the pharmaceutical industry, academic community, healthcare and insurance companies, policy makers,and individual, as the presence of a condition in disease nomenclature and classification greatly impacts the way it is treated, researched and reimbursed. However, achieving a satisfactory definition of disease is challenging, primarily due to the vague definitions of the state of health and disease.

Despite the growing abundance of biomarkers of aging, classifying aging as a disease will be challenging due to the absence of the "ideal norm." Despite significant effort from the academic and industry communities, sarcopenia is still not classified as a disease despite clear clinical and molecular representation and similarity with premature musculoskeletal aging and myotonic disorders. One approach to address this challenge is to assume an "ideal" disease-free physiological state at a certain age, for example, 25 years of age, and develop a set of interventions to keep the patients as close to that state as possible. Considering the WHO definition of health, it may be possible to agree on the optimal set of biomarkers that would be characteristic to the "state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, not merely the absence of infirmity" and agree on the physiological threshold after which the net totality of deviation of these biomarkers from norm can be considered a disease.

Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/024877


View the full article at FightAging




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