Is slowing down or reversing the aging process realistic?

[Princhester]

Thinking big though, are there any known “hard limits” to stopping or reversing ageing?

When we speculate about, say, travel to the stars we know that engineering is a developing art. We can imagine that in the future we might come up with various engineering solutions to some of the known minor problems. We can imagine that some of those solutions may overcome problems that at the moment seem insoluable. However, we still tend to state with confidence that travel to the stars seems highly unlikely because of the hard limits imposed by the distances involved and the upper bound that is the speed of light.

When it comes to ageing though, are there such hard limits? If we speculate that in future we gain through gradual accretion an essentially entire knowledge of every bodily process down to the finest level, and an essentially entire engineering capability over those processes, would prevention of ageing still be blocked by some hard limit?

I’d be interested in the views of people who know more but when you consider that every part of our body is manufactured in the first few years of life, I wonder if one can assume that it must be impossible to remanufacture.

[elfkin477]

@MandaJo

But quality of life HAS increased even more than the quantity. I am 34. In my lifetime, a broken hip on an elderly person was a death sentence: you’d never get much mobility back, if any, you’d have to spend the rest of your life in a nursing home, and once you are on your back all day every day, it’s just a matter of time. People were commonly effective shut-ins by 60 simply from arthritis. Seventy year old people were often elderly: frail, paranoid of that single life-ending fall, in chronic pain. Lots of people in their 40s and 50s were half-crippled because of bad knees, bad backs, bad shoulders.

Now, joint surgeries alone–from simple laproscopic cartilage clean-outs all the way to total joint replacements–have changed all that. Half the people I know over 60 have had some sort of joint surgery at some point, and in each case it’s contributed tremendously to their long-term quality of life. And pain relief! Better NSAIDs, like naproxen have tremendously improved quality of life over the last 30 years.

Life expectancy hasn’t actually improved all that much in my lifetime, but a “normal” quality of life has easily been pushed out ten years, maybe more.

I might be wrong, but I think Uncle Goat means we should be concerned with the quality of life for people reaching the end of the current life expectancy rather than simply hoping to get people to live longer. Considering that your odds of getting Alzheimer’s are almost 50% once you live past 85, I agree with that. What’s the point of hoping lots of people live to 100 when odds are even you’ll be senile long before then?

[lazybratsche]

@Princhester

Thinking big though, are there any known “hard limits” to stopping or reversing ageing?

When we speculate about, say, travel to the stars we know that engineering is a developing art. We can imagine that in the future we might come up with various engineering solutions to some of the known minor problems. We can imagine that some of those solutions may overcome problems that at the moment seem insoluable. However, we still tend to state with confidence that travel to the stars seems highly unlikely because of the hard limits imposed by the distances involved and the upper bound that is the speed of light.

When it comes to ageing though, are there such hard limits? If we speculate that in future we gain through gradual accretion an essentially entire knowledge of every bodily process down to the finest level, and an essentially entire engineering capability over those processes, would prevention of ageing still be blocked by some hard limit?

I’d be interested in the views of people who know more but when you consider that every part of our body is manufactured in the first few years of life, I wonder if one can assume that it must be impossible to remanufacture.

Good question. I think preserving the brain in any kind of useful functioning state is going to be the hardest part. You can’t replace the brain and preserve any of the old brain’s memories, experiences, personality, consciousness, or frankly just about anything that makes a human unique. Short of some sort of magical Star Trek neural matrix re-pattern-o-matic, all we can hope for is to slow down the aging process in the brain.

And the aging process is inevitable. Almost all of the neurons in your brain were born early in development, and can not be replaced. Every other tissue in the body replaces itself with new cells eventually (which is where telomeres matter, since they limit the number of times a cell can divide). A neuron in the brain, however, has to survive for an entire life time. Neurons are delicate and high-maintenance cells, and if a few minor things go wrong a neuron will happily fry itself. (Many neurodegenerative diseases are seemingly minor errors in cell metabolism. These errors don’t cause any problems in other cell types, but they rapidly kill neurons). Plus there are all sorts of every day traumas that contribute to brain damage over a life time – you kill every time you bump your head, get tipsy, or inhale paint fumes. IMO cognitive decline and neurodegeneration are inevitable. As elfkin477 points out, most people get alzheimers if they live long enough. If you manage to fix every other health problem of aging, you might end up with physically healthy 90, 100, 120 year old people who all eventually succumb to dementia.

I think it’s plausible to slow down neurodegeneration to some extent, but stopping it would pretty much entail putting the brain into some sort of stasis. Some people do manage to live to 90 or 100 with most of their cognitive abilities intact, so it may be possible to find out why and slow neurodegeneration to a similar or greater extent in everyone.

With the rest of the body, I think it’s plausible that we might some day, hundreds of years from now, regrow or replace every organ. Hell, modern life support techniques already go a long way towards keeping a patient alive indefinitely.

[Uncle_Goat]

@MandaJo

But quality of life HAS increased even more than the quantity. I am 34. In my lifetime, a broken hip on an elderly person was a death sentence: you’d never get much mobility back, if any, you’d have to spend the rest of your life in a nursing home, and once you are on your back all day every day, it’s just a matter of time. People were commonly effective shut-ins by 60 simply from arthritis. Seventy year old people were often elderly: frail, paranoid of that single life-ending fall, in chronic pain. Lots of people in their 40s and 50s were half-crippled because of bad knees, bad backs, bad shoulders.

Now, joint surgeries alone–from simple laproscopic cartilage clean-outs all the way to total joint replacements–have changed all that. Half the people I know over 60 have had some sort of joint surgery at some point, and in each case it’s contributed tremendously to their long-term quality of life. And pain relief! Better NSAIDs, like naproxen have tremendously improved quality of life over the last 30 years.

Life expectancy hasn’t actually improved all that much in my lifetime, but a “normal” quality of life has easily been pushed out ten years, maybe more.

Broken hips can still be death sentences for people. We have elderly people dying because they are afraid to turn on the AC in the summer or have had their heat cut off and freeze to death in the winter.

Pain pills are well and good if you can afford them. Does your insurance cover joint surgeries? Or is that a pre-existing condition that you have to live with? Does hip replacement surgery come free, or do you have to live with pain and hope the canes you got at the yard sale will be enough?

Sure, for the few, life is fine and dandy all the way until the final curtain. For billions of others, “Life is an unlovely struggle against unfair odds culminating in a cheap funeral.”