THE PILLS TO END AGEING

No longer the stuff of science fiction, affordable treatments that could slow, stop or even reverse your ageing are, thanks to new breakthroughs, less than a decade away... You might even be taking some of them already

- ANDREW STEELE

Are you, or is someone you know, ageing? Of course you are: though a handful of wellness influencers claim otherwise, the processes of biological ageing are ticking along within us all. But there’s good news – scientists now understand enough about those processes that we may one day be able to slow them down, or even reverse them. And that day might arrive sooner than you think.

While you should take the claims of social media biohackers with a very large pinch of salt, longevity science is beginning to uncover the mechanisms that make us grow old. It goes far beyond vanity – such scientists aren’t just trying to create new anti-ageing skin creams to smooth fine lines and wrinkles, but real anti-ageing medicines that will slow the advance of those biological processes happening inside all of us.

The biology of ageing essentially causes diseases like cancer, cardiovascular disease and dementia. For example, while having high blood pressure roughly doubles your chance of a heart attack, being aged 80 rather than 40 multiplies that risk by 10. That means understanding the biology behind these enormous risk increases could lead to the greatest revolution in medicine since the discovery of antibiotics. It could transform not just the treatment, but the prevention of disease in the first place.

The prize, if we can identify and treat these underlying causes of ageing, is enormous. If we could make people in middle age a bit biologically younger with drugs that address the ageing process, we could improve everything from heart health to wrinkles, and delay the onset of cancer, dementia and frailty, all at the same time.

Scientists have identified several so-called ‘hallmarks’ of the ageing process – underlying biological and biochemical processes that are common to multiple, different diseases and dysfunctions associated with old age. By tackling these hallmarks, we could potentially prevent many of these problems simultaneously.