3 replies to this topic

[AgeVivo]

Brussels, December 12th-14th 2012: Your presence can be key to convince the European Commission to count more on biology of ageing to extend healthy lives in the not so distant future

More details below.

[AgeVivo]

http://www.google.fr...KOPBCICFsVVl-ig

Healthy ageing is vital for development
9 APRIL 2002 - PREVENTION OF NONCOMMUNICABLE DISEASES THROUGHOUT THE LIFE COURSE IS KEY SAYS NEW WHO POLICY ROADMAP
"A healthy population is a prerequisite for economic growth," said Dr Gro Harlem Brundtland, Director-General of WHO. "The predicted explosion of noncommunicable diseases — like heart disease, cancer or depression — in the ever-increasing number of older persons globally will result in enormous human and social costs unless preventive action is taken now. A disproportionate amount of resources will need to be diverted to handle these largely preventable health problems," she added.

[Pour_la_Science]

Nice oxymoron for the WHO. What don't they want to say 'slow-aging', 'delayed-aging'?

[AgeVivo]

1) Because they feel they would not look serious.
2) Also because it can be understood from a demographic/economic/political/population perspective: population is 'inevitably' getting older ("ageing"), which has terrible economic and societal consequences. Maintaining a globally healthy population despite the ageing trend (Healthy Ageing) is therefore vital.

Pushing things to extremes, for the sake of understanding (my understanding at least)
-- decaying aging as fast as the population profile is getting older is one way
-- not providing health care to old persons is another way (if you look at death rate patterns in Switzerland you understand that it is implicitely not far from it) / to make it extremely extreme killing old persons answers the question (not well ;-)
-- having many babies is arguablie an approach to avoid "population ageing" (people still age) / same for immigration of young populations

For now, there is a tendency to transform the "Healthy Ageing" goal into "Maintaining frailty", largely because right now people providing electronic and mecanical help to frail persons have more concrete projects than the biology-of-aging community and use words that policy makers understand. I have written more details about it in the SENS forums (http://www.sens.org/...44#comment-3438) and this is the goal of the conference: count on us, we have concrete biomedical projects against aging, we are the solution!!