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[Avatar of Horus]

3 related articles about an important subject:

Scientists Urge Global Investment and Action Plan to Avert Impending Aging Crisis
http://www.scienceda...00714141532.htm
July 14, 2010 — Now that scientists have learned so much about aging through laboratory studies, it's time to translate those findings into medicines that can benefit our aging population. That was the message delivered by a panel of 10 preeminent aging experts that included Jan Vijg, Ph.D., chair of genetics and the Lola and Saul Kramer Chair in Molecular Genetics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University.

The expert panel was convened by the LifeStar Institute, a nonprofit organization that educates the public about the consequences of global aging and supports medical research aimed at preventing and curing age-related diseases. Their report was published in the July 14 issue of the journal Science Translational Medicine.
The aging process results in significant social and medical costs that will rise rapidly in the coming decades as the number of elderly people increases. To prevent what it calls "a global aging crisis," the panel recommends that the U.S. and other countries collaborate in an international initiative that will translate laboratory findings about aging into new kinds of medicines.
More specifically, the panel urged countries to use their public health agencies to inform citizens about how they can improve their lifestyles so that they can live longer and healthier lives. In addition, the panel wrote, there is a need to develop regenerative therapies that could restore youthful structure and function in older people by repairing and neutralizing the cellular damage that occurs with aging.
"There is this misunderstanding that aging is something that just happens to you, like the weather, and cannot be influenced," said Dr. Vijg. "The big surprise of the last decades is that, in many different animals, we can increase healthy life span in various ways. A program of developing and testing similar interventions in humans would make both medical and economic sense."

Baby Boomer Health Care Crisis Looms
http://www.scienceda...80417111300.htm
Apr. 25, 2008 — America's aging citizens are facing a health care workforce too small and unprepared to meet their needs, according to a new report from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) titled "Retooling for an Aging America: Building the Health Care Workforce."

The Gerontological Society of America (GSA), the nation's largest organization devoted to aging research, fully supports the publication's call for a labor pool of adequate size and competency to care for a rapidly increasing over-65 population.
"This pivotal report lays out a much-needed strategy for developing a network of health professionals and frontline workers to avert a crisis in quality care for older persons," said GSA President Lisa Gwyther, MSW. "Complex chronic illness is an issue that we all will face with age. The current fragmented system of care desperately requires an increase in better-prepared personnel to sustain itself."
The report was the result of 15 months of research overseen by a committee of 15 health care experts, many of whom are GSA members.
Committee Chair John W. Rowe, MD, a professor of health policy and management at Columbia University and a former GSA president, said America must prepare itself for demographic changes.
"The combination of the aging of the Baby Boom generation and the increase in life expectancy is going to yield a doubling of the numbers of older people," he said. "And it's important to understand that older people themselves account for a disproportionate amount of the utilization of health care resources."
Despite these trends, "the actual number of geriatricians is going down, not up, in the United States," Rowe added.
Marie Bernard, MD, president of The Association for Gerontology in Higher Education (GSA's educational unit), said policymakers must act quickly to address these problems.
"To meet the needs of our aging parents and grandparents, we need to increase the number of geriatric health specialists — both to provide care for those older adults with the most complex issues and to train the rest of the workforce in the common medical problems of old age," Bernard said.
Sponsorship for the IOM project was provided by The John A. Hartford Foundation, The Atlantic Philanthropies, The Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The Retirement Research Foundation, The California Endowment, The Archstone Foundation, The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, and The Commonwealth Fund.

Slowing Aging Is Way To Fight Diseases In 21st Century
http://www.scienceda...80708200624.htm
July 10, 2008 — A group of aging experts from the United States and the United Kingdom suggest that the best strategy for preventing and fighting a multitude of diseases is to focus on slowing the biological processes of aging.

"The traditional medical approach of attacking individual diseases -- cancer, diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease -- will soon become less effective if we do not determine how all of these diseases either interact or share common mechanisms with aging," says S. Jay Olshansky, professor of epidemiology at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health and senior author of the commentary.
Middle-aged and older people are most often impacted by simultaneous but independent medical conditions. A cure for any of the major fatal diseases would have only a marginal impact on life expectancy and the length of healthy life, Olshansky said.
The authors suggest that a new paradigm of health promotion and disease prevention could produce unprecedented social, economic and health dividends for current and future generations if the aging population is provided with extended years of healthy life.
They note that all living things, including humans, possess biochemical mechanisms that influence how quickly we age and, through dietary intervention or genetic alteration, it is possible to extend lifespan to postpone aging-related processes and diseases.
Further research in laboratory models is expected to provide clues and deeper understanding of how existing interventions, such as exercise and good nutrition, may lead to lifelong well-being.
The authors also propose greatly increased funding for basic research into the "fundamental cellular and physiological changes that drive aging itself."
"We believe that the potential benefits of slowing aging processes have been underrecognized by most of the scientific community," said Olshansky. "We call on the health-research decision-makers to allocate substantial resources to support and develop practical interventions that slow aging in people."
An increase in age-related diseases and escalating health care costs makes this the time for a "systematic attack on aging itself," the authors write.
Olshansky and colleagues contend that modern medicine is already heavily invested in efforts to extend life, and they argue that a fresh emphasis on aging has the potential to improve health and quality of life far more efficiently than is currently possible.
The analysis is published on www.BMJ.com
Olshansky's co-authors include Dr. Robert Butler of the International Longevity Center in New York, Dr. Richard Miller of the University of Michigan, Daniel Perry of the Alliance for Aging Research in Washington, Bruce Carnes and Dr. Marie Bernard of the University of Oklahoma, Dr. T. Franklin Williams of the University of Rochester, Dr. Christine Cassel of the American Board of Internal Medicine in Philadelphia, Dr. Jacob Brody of UIC, Linda Partridge of University College London, Thomas Kirkwood of Newcastle University and Dr. George Martin of the American Federation for Aging Research and University of Washington.

[niner]

We certainly need more of this. I note that these reports are 3 to 5 years old, which suggests that the message isn't sinking in. This isn't entirely surprising, given that humans have had millions of years to absorb the message that death is inevitable, and to build elaborate memetic structures around that narrative. It's nice to see a growing scientific consensus around this message, but we need to do more outreach like this. If our attempts to replicate Baati et al. bear fruit, it will give us a fantastic demonstration of the plasticity of lifespan, which should open a few more eyes.

[Avatar of Horus]

We certainly need more of this. I note that these reports are 3 to 5 years old, which suggests that the message isn't sinking in. This isn't entirely surprising, given that humans have had millions of years to absorb the message that death is inevitable, and to build elaborate memetic structures around that narrative. It's nice to see a growing scientific consensus around this message, but we need to do more outreach like this. If our attempts to replicate Baati et al. bear fruit, it will give us a fantastic demonstration of the plasticity of lifespan, which should open a few more eyes.

I agree, and yes it seems that the message didn't break through yet generally. However I think that the society and the policymakers must deal with this problem sooner or later, as the elder caring costs in the current approach will rise increasingly. And the question is that will it eventually be a soft or a hard landing, before something will be done.

[caliban]

You are confusing the point of pamphlets 1st+3rd vs. 2nd.

Geriatrics ≠Biogerontology... and they often compete.

[Avatar of Horus]

What do you mean?

The way I see it is that the 2nd one just illustrates one aspect of the impending crisis: the growing costs need of elderly care, including hospitalization, work force, etc., as the number and the percentage of the older people are increasing. And the point of the other two is that something, like increased spending, should be done too on the anti-aging/regenerative research and therapies front, to reduce those costs.

Edited by Avatar of Horus, 23 April 2013 - 01:43 AM.

[Avatar of Horus]

Here are some figures and an article about the US, illustrating the problem:

I created a graph from the population data:


And the spending numbers:

Source: http://www.usgovernm...get_2012_1.html
Note the great difference between the total and for research & dev spending, like to NIH.
And a small part of that goes to the NIA; for comparison the budget of National Institute on Aging

source: http://www.nia.nih.g...t/budget-graphs

The numbers are speaking for themselves I think.

and the article

Comparing Projected Growth in Health Care Expenditures and the Economy
May 2006

The rising cost of health care is much in the news. Health costs continue to grow faster than national income and, despite research indicating that we the get good value for the increased spending, some policy makers and health analysts question whether governments and private employers can continue to finance the level of care that they do today. This paper illustrates the magnitude of savings that would be needed in order to bring health care cost growth closer to the rate of national income growth, and suggests that none of the usual policy options raised in health policy or political circles is likely to significantly close the gap between the growth of health spending and income.1

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) recently released projected health care expenditures for the 2005 through 2015 period.2 Total health expenditures are estimated to be $2.16 trillion in 2006, and are projected to rise to over $4 trillion in 2015. Per person health spending is $7,110 this year and is projected to increase to $12,320 by the end of the period.

Health spending continues to increase much faster than the overall economy (i.e., gross domestic product, or GDP). Since 1970, health care spending has grown at an average annual rate of 9.9%, or about 2.5 percentage points faster than GDP.3 In recent decades, the growth rates for health spending and GDP have slowed, but health spending growth remains consistently above GDP growth (Figure 1). As a share of the economy, health care has risen from 7.2% of GDP in 1965 to over 16% of GDP today, and it is projected to be 20% of GDP just 10 years from now.4



Although not a new phenomena, the rapid rate of growth in health spending relative to national income is raising concerns among policy makers and others as to whether our health care system is financially sustainable. On the public benefit side, spending growth, combined with the aging of the population, has raised concerns about the longer-term affordability of the Medicare and Medicaid programs.5
... from: http://www.kff.org/i...m050206oth2.cfm

[Avatar of Horus]

We certainly need more of this. I note that these reports are 3 to 5 years old, which suggests that the message isn't sinking in. ...
It's nice to see a growing scientific consensus around this message, but we need to do more outreach like this.

I found some info that a similar campaign is being continued:
source: http://www.agingrese...og/detail/4513/

Responding to the Aging of the Population
Jan. 9, 2012
Author: Cynthia Bens
A group of aging and Alzheimer’s advocates will be meeting this week with the senior leadership of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to call for an increase in funding for the National Institute on Aging (NIA). In advance of this meeting, the group has orchestrated a sign-on letter to demonstrate widespread support for $1.4 billion, an increase of $300 million, in the FY 2013 NIH Budget to support the NIA. A similar letter was generated last year and garnered more than 400 signatures.
The letter states:
“In stark contrast to the rapidly-rising costs of healthcare for the aging, we as a nation are making a miniscule, and declining, investment in the prevention, treatment or cure of aging conditions. While the current dollars appropriated to NIA seem to have risen significantly since FY 2003, when adjusted for inflation, they have decreased almost 18 percent in the last nine years. According to the NIH Almanac, out of each dollar appropriated to NIH, only 3.6 cents goes toward supporting the work of the NIA.”
To add your name to the letter and support this effort, please email paaapc@crosslink.net by 4:00 pm on Tuesday, January 10, 2012.
UPDATE: This letter was delivered to Dr. Francis Collins on January 12, 2012. More than 500 scientists supported this effort nationwide.

and:
source: http://www.agingrese...g/detail/26704

Let’s Get Loud
Apr. 5, 2013
Author: Cynthia Bens
To quote Jennifer Lopez ,“C’mon people, let’s get loud!” Hang up your lab coat, leave your pad folios and ipads behind, and dust off your protest sign, it’s time to make some noise for medical research!
For the past four months, the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) has been working with the Alliance for Aging Research and 200 other groups representing patients, researchers, innovators and healthcare providers to organize the Rally for Medical Research. This rally will take place on Monday, April 8, 2013 at 11:00 am in conjunction with AACR’s Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. Join NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins, political commentator Cokie Roberts, and several patients living with diseases like cancer, heart disease, and Alzheimer’ disease, in front of the Carnegie Library to demand that our nation's policymakers make life-saving medical research funding a national priority.
In the wake of budget devastation caused by sequestration in March, the rally will raise awareness about the critical need for a sustained investment in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to spur progress, inspire hope, improve health, and save lives. Just two months ago 40,000 activists turned out on the National Mall for a rally on climate policy. Don’t you think we should let our government officials know that we care as much for the health of our people as we do for the health of our planet? I do. Show up and make your voice heard on Monday! For more details on the rally, visit www.rallyformedicalresearch.org.

Possibly ImmInst/Longecity could help this group somehow or do some joint effort.

Edited by Avatar of Horus, 23 April 2013 - 03:41 PM.