Geroscience

Geroscience is the field built on the idea that aging itself drives most chronic disease, so slowing aging would postpone many diseases at once rather than one at a time. It is a claim about strategy as much as about biology: treat the shared cause instead of the separate outcomes.

The appeal is arithmetic. Cancer, heart disease, dementia and diabetes share one dominant risk factor, which is age. A treatment that cured any one of them would add a modest amount to average life expectancy, because the others would still be waiting. A treatment that delayed aging would push all of them back together.

The difficulty is that the strategy is hard to test. Regulators approve drugs for diseases, and aging is not classified as one, so a trial has to be framed around a specific condition or around a marker standing in for aging. This is why so much of the field’s evidence is in animals, where lifespan can be measured directly, and why the National Institute on Aging’s Interventions Testing Program — which tests candidate compounds in mice at three independent sites — has been so influential relative to its size.

The word now appears in two rather different places. It names a research programme with a specific hypothesis, and it appears in the marketing of clinics that describe themselves as integrating geroscience into clinical practice. The hypothesis is serious and unproven in humans. The clinical use of the term generally implies more settlement than exists.