Aging is not a disease

When we are young children, we age to become healthy adults. To declare aging as a disease essentially declares life itself as a disease.

But later in life, for reasons that we still don’t fully understand, our bodies deteriorate, decline, and as time passes, this decline worsens.

I was ready to invent new terminology for this stage when I remembered that we already have a scientific word to describe it, and that word is 'senescence,' introduced in 1891 by Charles Sedgwick Minot at the Physiological Laboratory of Harvard Medical School in a paper titled 'Senescence and Rejuvenation.'

But there is a paradox here.

Senescence also plays a crucial role in wound healing and other beneficial processes. When cells become senescent in response to damage or stress, they often aid in tissue repair and wound healing. So, an organism might have cells undergoing senescence for beneficial reasons, like wound healing, while still being generally healthy and not in a state of overall deterioration. Without a nuanced understanding, treatments aimed at combating senescence could inadvertently impair beneficial processes.

Over the last century, senescence has become more associated with cells rather than whole organisms. This perspective shift has left a void in the effort to understand senescence at the level of the organism. Under what conditions would one declare a person to be senescent?

The differentiation between aging, beneficial senescence, and detrimental senescence is a longstanding problem in longevity. Our mission is to recognize and distinguish these different motifs using biomarker information.