Reading: Is aging a disease?, Longevity Tech, 18 July 2025.

We know that the diseases of ageing take decades to creep up on us, and so there’s interest in intervening to prevent them—somehow. Putting aside the “what” you might do, there’s the question of when and why. 

Is (biological, as opposed to chronological) ageing a disease?

First, this is the wrong question […] The real question is whether aging should be a clinical indication for trials.

This is reminiscence of, but different to, a WSJ article which includes the idea of ageing as a risk factor. 

As someone not from a medical background, I had to check the definitions. An indication is a reason to treat, whereas a risk factor is something that increases the chances of a disease.

Aside: also from the article, I did not know that “obesity went through analogous debates for years.” But there is a difference here. As Topol puts it in Super Agers: “aging is universal, whereas obesity is not” (p. 319).

Tipping points

The idea of ageing as a reason to treat is an interesting one in light of Ageing accelerates around age 50 ― some organs faster than others (Nature, 25 July 2025):

“There are these waves of age-related changes,” she [Maja Olecka of the Leibniz Institute on Aging] says. “But it is still difficult to make a general conclusion about the timing of the inflection points.”

What I understand by that is you probably want a test for those points for use as an indication, which presumably lines up with biological ageing (whatever that is).

I find trying to define what we mean by ageing an interesting problem in itself. Right now it’s a mess.

Along with the spelling: ag-ing or age-ing.

To illustrate the mess, see also older posts with titles:

• Why we age
• There’s some shared thinking in the ageing research community
• The unpopular view that aging needs a foundational theory