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Credit: Simon Prades<\/p>\n
The study of ageing has shifted from a niche pursuit to a major area of research<\/a>. Over the past two decades, scientists have flooded the field, determined to unlock the secret to a longer, healthier life<\/a>. \u201cVarious people have started to think we could intervene in the ageing process and extend lifespan. [The field] has really exploded because of that view,\u201d says Alan Cohen, a biologist at Columbia University in New York City.<\/p>\n But even as interest grows, scientists have yet to reach consensus on fundamental concepts in biological ageing, Cohen says. There is no widespread agreement on what ageing is or when it begins, or what the goal should be in investigating it. \u201cThere are people like me who think we can\u2019t intervene \u2014 and even if we could, we shouldn\u2019t \u2014 to people at the far end of the extreme who say we should make humans immortal and every moment we delay is equivalent to murder,\u201d Cohen says. \u201cSerious scientists are at every point along that spectrum.\u201d<\/p>\n Nature Index 2025 Ageing<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n A key contention is whether ageing should be considered a disease<\/a>. As Richard Faragher, a biogerontologist at the University of Brighton, UK, puts it, if a disease is defined as something abnormal, then ageing does not count. But if a disease is defined as something that is preventable, treatable and able to be slowed down, then ageing is a disease.<\/p>\n Scientists, doctors and philosophers have pondered this question for centuries, but as more countries confront the realities of an ageing population, the debate has taken on new urgency, and it has the potential to influence everything from the direction of research to how older people are treated in society. \u201cThis is the early phase of an incredibly rapidly growing field,\u201d says John Beard, an epidemiologist at Columbia University. \u201cI think people are open to thinking about it in new ways, if a new way makes sense.\u201d<\/p>\n Is ageing a disease?<\/b><\/p>\n The concept of what is and isn\u2019t a disease has changed over time. For example, before the 1960s, developing high blood pressure in older age was not considered a problem, says Faragher. \u201cNow, we know that your blood pressure going through the roof is not benign.\u201d Crucially, he adds, labelling high blood pressure, or hypertension, as a disease brought both funding and research attention to find treatments for it. \u201cThings only start to get studied when they become problems.\u201d<\/p>\n Some people like to think of ageing as \u201ca kind of optimal, almost benign decline\u201d with certain diseases overlaid, says Faragher. But he and some other researchers argue that this oversimplifies things, that ageing and disease aren\u2019t necessarily separate, and that treating them as such can hold back progress on understanding and managing the process. Ageing \u201cis inseparable from pathology\u201d, says Faragher. He points to senescent cells \u2014 damaged cells that behave in harmful ways and accumulate with age \u2014 which not only contribute to conditions such as heart disease, osteoporosis and cognitive impairment, but are also linked to hallmarks of ageing such as grey hair and wrinkles. In animal studies1<\/a>, deleting these cells leads to \u201cdramatic increases\u201d in health and lifespan, Faragher says, which suggests that this aspect of ageing \u201cis both treatable and reversible\u201d.<\/p>\n James Pacala, an academic geriatrician at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, says that for some researchers, the ideal scenario in ageing science is to find \u201csome common cellular and molecular denominator that leads to all of the declines we see with ageing\u201d. Cohen says it\u2019s unlikely, however, that a single cause could explain ageing, because millions of factors probably contribute to the body gradually losing its ability to stay organized and function properly. Faragher agrees that there probably isn\u2019t one single mechanism of ageing, but that there is a small set of key mechanisms \u2014 such as a build-up of senescent cells \u2014 that act together as a loose network and cause many age-related diseases as well as ageing itself.<\/p>\n If ageing were to be categorized as a disease, it would probably cause the biggest ripples not in laboratories, but in the regulatory and funding support that those labs receive, says Ming Guo, director of the Aging Center at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. \u201cIt would be a paradigm shift,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n This would be especially true in places such as the United States, where federal science agencies and drug-approval bodies tend to focus on diseases that produce clear, measurable results, such as improvements in symptoms. Declaring ageing a disease \u201cwould unleash a lot of research funding, facilitate drug development and ultimately lead to faster approval of the geroprotective therapies\u201d, Guo says.<\/p>\n Faragher agrees that the \u2018disease\u2019 label would expedite solutions. \u201cI think the question is more along the lines of \u2018Do you want to do something about these problems or not?\u2019\u201d he says. \u201cIf ageing is a disease, then you\u2019ve decided it\u2019s worth doing something about it.\u201d<\/p>\n The case against<\/b><\/p>\n Some scientists argue that the way ageing is discussed in research has major ethical implications. \u2018Old age\u2019 nearly became an official disease in 2022, when the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) \u2014 a global catalogue of known human diseases \u2014 sought to give it a diagnostic code in its latest revision2<\/a>. Some doctors and scientists pushed back, however, which ultimately led the World Health Organization (WHO), the ICD\u2019s publisher, to withdraw the listing. \u201cThe WHO retracted it based on the science \u2014 and on the unintended ethical, moral and social consequences,\u201d says Kiran Rabheru, a geriatric psychiatrist at the University of Ottawa in Canada.<\/p>\n For one thing, calling ageing a disease could negatively change people\u2019s view of their agency over the process, says Sundeep Khosla, an endocrinologist who studies ageing at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. \u201cFrom a patient\u2019s perspective, it leads to a mindset of \u2018Well, I need a drug to cure the disease\u2019,\u201d he says. \u201cIt perhaps shifts focus away from what should remain the major intervention: lifestyle.\u201d<\/p>\n Ageism is another concern<\/a>. If ageing is classified as a disease, then anyone over 60 or 65 (or whatever cut-off was chosen) would be considered \u2018diseased people\u2019, Guo says. Half of the world\u2019s population is already ageist, according to a 2021 WHO report on the issue of ageism3<\/a> (see \u2018Ageism attitudes\u2019) so categorizing older people as diseased would only add to that stigma, Rabheru says.<\/p>\n Some researchers argue that it doesn\u2019t make sense, biologically, to call ageing a disease. Because although ageing increases the risk of most chronic diseases<\/a>, \u201cyou either have a disease or you don\u2019t \u2014 and who doesn\u2019t have ageing?\u201d says Beard.<\/p>\n The tendency to think of ageing as a disease reflects what Beard describes as an \u201coutdated way of thinking\u201d \u2014 one that focuses too narrowly on individual problems and their specific biological causes. For example, the fact that the immune system naturally weakens with age doesn\u2019t just impact the heart, as previously thought, but seems to increase arthritis4<\/a> and dementia5<\/a> risk, too. \u201cWe now understand from geoscience that age-related biological change simultaneously increases the risk of almost all chronic conditions,\u201d says Beard.<\/p>\n Future outcomes<\/b><\/p>\n For some, the debate over whether ageing should be classified as a disease is growing tiresome. \u201cAt major international meetings, after people have a second beer, this topic comes up over and over and over again,\u201d says Richard Miller, a biogerontologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. \u201cI walk away from those discussions.\u201d<\/p>\n There seems to be a strong cultural element to the debate, says Cohen, and points out that it\u2019s mostly being carried out by researchers in North America and Europe. Joe Poh Sheng Yeong, director of immunopathology at Singapore General Hospital, agrees, noting that in Asia, many governments and societies are more focused on dealing with the real-world pressures of ageing populations rather than getting caught up in the semantics.<\/p>\n Beard adds that the push to label ageing as a disease is likely to be strongest in countries where research funding is tied to disease-based categories, and where health-care systems pay doctors and hospitals for each test, procedure or treatment they perform. This creates more incentive to classify ageing as a medical problem, because it opens up more opportunities for billable services.<\/p>\n Key dates in ageing research<\/p>\n 1903:<\/b> The term \u2018gerontology\u2019 coined to describe the study of ageing<\/p>\n 1961:<\/b> Cellular senescence discovered<\/p>\n 1974:<\/b> US National Institute of Aging established<\/p>\n 1995:<\/b> Senescent cells detected in human ageing skin<\/p>\n 2007:<\/b> Geroscience introduced as an interdisciplinary science<\/p>\n 2013:<\/b> Metformin found to expand lifespan of mice<\/p>\n 2013:<\/b> Concept of epigenetic \u2018clock\u2019 linking DNA methylation to biological age proposed<\/p>\n 2016:<\/b> Human metformin trial launched<\/p>\n 2021:<\/b> The WHO releases global report on ageism<\/p>\n 2022:<\/b> The WHO introduces \u2018age-related\u2019 code in International Classification of Diseases after withdrawing \u2018old age\u2019<\/p>\n 2025:<\/b> Map of DNA methylation changes shows that some tissues age faster than others<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Credit: Simon Prades The study of ageing has shifted from a niche pursuit to a major area of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":177911,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[275],"tags":[5392,869,18,135,475,474,1099,19,17,1100,94462,133],"class_list":{"0":"post-177910","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-ageing","9":"tag-alzheimers-disease","10":"tag-eire","11":"tag-health","12":"tag-health-care","13":"tag-healthcare","14":"tag-humanities-and-social-sciences","15":"tag-ie","16":"tag-ireland","17":"tag-multidisciplinary","18":"tag-research-data","19":"tag-science"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115540702724077172","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177910","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177910"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177910\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/177911"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177910"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177910"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177910"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/d41586-025-03525-3_51692314.jpg\"\/)
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