Boundaries and Labels: Anti-Aging Medicine and Science

Public alignment with longevity biotechnology: an analysis of framing in surveys and opinion studies

This article examines the framing and public perception of longevity biotechnology, or geroscience, which aims to extend both healthspan and lifespan by targeting the biological processes of aging. Although often seen as moving into the mainstream, questions remain about its ability to meet these ambitious goals, given the complexities of understanding and manipulating aging biology. Drawing on an analysis of qualitative studies and surveys conducted over the past two decades, this paper explores how public attitudes toward anti-aging science are framed, suggesting that studies often emphasize life extension over healthspan gains. Findings reveal mixed reactions, with both interest in and ambivalence about the desirability of extended lifespans. In response, this paper recommends that stakeholders in longevity biotechnology engage with the public by understanding unmet health needs rather than assuming a widespread embrace of lifespan extension. The article underscores the importance of aligning public engagement strategies with realistic scientific expectations to foster credibility and trust; promises should be grounded in current scientific evidence and tempered by feasibility. Addressing societal concerns and fostering dialogue on the ethical and social implications of manipulating aging processes could lay a foundation for responsible progress in geroscience and biogerontology, supporting a more informed, inclusive conversation between science and society as these fields advance.

Insights into the Anti-Aging Prevention and Diagnostic Medicine and Healthcare

Aging is an irreversible and natural phenomenon that occurs as a person ages. Anti-aging medicine applies advanced science and medical technology to early detection, prevention, treatment, and reversal of age-related dysfunctions, disorders, and diseases. Therefore, anti-aging diagnostic medicine and healthcare are important factors in helping the elderly population lead healthy and active lives. However, it is challenging to diagnose various aging and related diseases accurately through various forms of anti-aging diagnostic medicine and health management. It may not be treated appropriately, so many older people are making various efforts to prevent aging themselves in advance. Therefore, anti-aging medicine and health care have been developed in various forms, from health checkups to alternative medicine and biophysical technology beyond simple clinical medicine, and are being applied to demand the needs of the elderly. This review intends to explore and characterize various applications related to anti-aging medicine and healthcare in the elderly. In addition, economic, medical, and ethical considerations arising from the relationship between the increase in the elderly population and the continuous development of anti-aging medicine can be considered.

Aging of cerebellar Purkinje cells

Cerebellar Purkinje cells (PCs), the sole output neurons in the cerebellar cortex, play an important role in the cerebellar circuit. PCs appear to be rather sensitive to aging, exhibiting significant changes in both morphology and function during senescence. This article reviews such changes during the normal aging process, including a decrease in the quantity of cells, atrophy in the soma, retraction in the dendritic arborizations, degeneration in the subcellular organelles, a decline in synapse density, disorder in the neurotransmitter system, and alterations in electrophysiological properties. Although these deteriorative changes occur during aging, compensatory mechanisms exist to counteract the impairments in the aging PCs. The possible neural mechanisms underlying these changes and potential preventive treatments are discussed.

Understanding and tackling aging: two fields communicating (a little) at last

Those who have followed this journal's, and this author's, efforts over recent years to stimulate the rational design of interventions to combat aging have good reason for bewilderment that the concerted application of our knowledge of biology to the defeat of humanity's foremost killer needed to be kick-started by a bearded troublemaker whose formal academic training was not even in biology at all. Elsewhere in this issue I bemoan the persistent balkanisation of traditional gerontology, whereby biologists, clinicians, sociologists and psychologists studying the elderly seem almost studiously to avoid each other even when participating in the same conference. In this commentary, however, I have something more positive to report. A string of recent and forthcoming conferences, organized not only by those at the forefront of life-extension research but also by highly influential mainstream groups, have publicly endorsed the Methuselah Foundation's goal of defeating aging. The field of biomedical gerontology-the interface between biogerontology and geriatrics, where biological knowledge is focused on developing the geriatrics of tomorrow-is not a traditional component of gerontology, having been poorly appreciated by biogerontologists and geriatricians alike, but these developments show that it is rapidly taking its place at that table.