What is aging? study

Nature news has this interesting piece on the disagreement among researchers who study aging.  What is aging?  A sample from the news story:

A key goal of ageing research is to help people live longer, healthier lives. But the exact causes of ageing, as well as effective approaches to slow or reverse it, remain elusive. For the field to tackle these challenges, researchers need to speak a common language, says Alan Cohen, who studies ageing at Columbia University in New York City. “There doesn’t have to be perfect consensus, but we need to sort things out quite a bit,” he says.

....Researchers also disagree on whether ageing is a disease. More than one-third of respondents said it is, another 38% said it isn’t and the remaining 28% were neutral. Cohen doesn’t favour describing ageing as a disease because it implies that it is something that needs to be eliminated, although many researchers in the field are, to some extent, working towards this goal.

The survey mentioned in the news item is here.

Cheers, 

Colin