Ageing should be classed as a disease in itself, say leading academics – Telegraph.co.uk

Ageing should be classified as a disease to provide better treatment of the elderly, says an international group of leading medics and academics.

They are urging the World Health Organisation (WHO) to rethink the way it classifies illnesses so ageing is no longer seen as a natural process but a disease in its own right that leads to frailty, disability and ultimately death.

They say the WHOs current bible which defines and lists all diseases focuses doctors on individual critical conditions rather than the wider range of degenerative changes as people age.

The 30 experts - from Harvard, Stanford and MIT to Cambridge, Imperial and UCL - said their inclusion would encourage doctors to diagnose and prescribe treatments including drugs, diet and exercise that could prevent age-related conditions developing into critical illnesses.

The WHOs health bible - known as the International Classification of Disease (ICD) - determines what doctors around the world diagnose, treat and record.

However, Dr Stuart Calimport, one of the lead authors, cited inconsistencies such as sarcopenia, an age-related muscle-wasting, which was included in the ICD while age-related wearing out of other organs was not.

Critical to ageing is a process known as senescence in which cells throughout the body age, releasing inflammatory factors and enzymes that the immune system can no longer destroy

When senescent cells build up in the skin causing wrinkles it is considered a natural change. Yet when senescent cells build up in the heart and blood vessels, causing blood vessels to calcify, we call it cardiovascular disease, said Dr Calimport, of Liverpool University.

This is an error of logic and categorisation and not due to the intrinsic nature or complexity of pathology or disease.

An ageing disease classified and assessed for the level of severity in one organ can be unclassified in another.

With a lack of classifications and staging, pathological ageing changes may not be logged. This means that treatment needs may be overlooked, such as atrophy, calcification and ageing in organs and tissues where these are not classified or assessed for severity.

Dr Calimport did not believe the classification of more diseases would provide a bonanza for drug firms to develop treatments that would push up the NHS bill.

He said there were already cheap drugs such as Metformin, which was used to treat diabetes and had been shown to be effective in countering age-related conditions.

It would allow for preventative medicine such as social prescribing or the prescribing of exercise. It might not totally prevent ageing but at the moment we are not even recognising ageing in a way that it can be properly recorded and tracked said Dr Calimport.

If you cant track it, how can you prevent it, or slow it down?

The WHO is currently considering submissions for changes to the ICD which will be published next year. There are major updates every decade.

The proposals comes as the number of elderly are expected more than double from 900 million worldwide aged over 60 to two billion by 2050.

By 2030, one in five people in the UK (21.8 per cent) will be aged 65 or over, 6.8 per cent will be aged 75-plus and 3.2 per cent will be aged 85-plus.

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Ageing should be classed as a disease in itself, say leading academics - Telegraph.co.uk