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Heart attacks are a downstream consequence of the molecular damage of aging. Everything that isn't repairing the root cause damage of aging is going to be a mu
by reasonattlm 10y ago
Heart attacks are a downstream consequence of the molecular damage of aging.
Everything that isn't repairing the root cause damage of aging is going to be a much less effective way of going about things if the goal is to avoid cardiovascular events of that nature. Keeping a machine from a specific failure mode without actually repairing the damage that raises the odds of that failure mode is a much harder thing to do than to enact repair.
This is largely why medicine for age-related conditions has been an incremental process over recent decades: advanced enough to do sensible things with downstream consequences of damage, and so produce marginal effects at sizable investment of time and resources but for various reasons unwilling or unable to address the damage itself. The reduction in heart disease over the past 30 years has been an enormous achievement when considered within these bounds: really going above and beyond, finding ways to keep the accumulation of damage from having the same level of consequences and juggling biochemistry to keep running at a lower failure rate for longer.
But still incremental, and to really solve the problem you have to repair the damage. Nothing else is going to do the job.
- melling 10y agoThere are 600,000 heart attack deaths in the US alone every year. And I imagine many millions worldwide. Incremental progress can save millions of lives a year.
- coldtea 10y ago>Everything that isn't repairing the root cause damage of aging is going to be a much less effective way of going about things if the goal is to avoid cardiovascular events of that nature. Tons of heart attacks before the age of 60 can be avoided simply by better diet and more exercise. Given that, it doesn't matter if not ALL are. Especially if the alternative is hoping for some unicorn anti-aging discovery. >But still incremental, and to really solve the problem you have to repair the damage. Nothing else is going to do the job. Yeah, we're still are going to age and die in the end. But the job here is not immortality, is not going down from a heart attack before that...