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 1. nature
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 * NEWS
 * 03 December 2024


WHAT IS AGEING? EVEN THE FIELD’S RESEARCHERS CAN’T AGREE

Survey of scientists who study ageing finds no consensus on the fundamentals.
   By
 * Smriti Mallapaty

 1. Smriti Mallapaty
    View author publications
    
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When ageing begins is one of many questions researchers cannot agree on.Credit:
mrPliskin/iStock via Getty

Researchers studying ageing disagree on just about everything — including what
ageing is, whether it is a disease and when it starts — according to a survey of
about 100 scientists working in the field.

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.

Vadim Gladyshev, another researcher in the field who is based at Harvard Medical
School in Boston, Massachusetts, and his colleagues agree. They decided to
survey participants at an international conference on ageing in Newry, Maine, in
2022, to better understand the views of those researching the topic. Respondents
included early-career researchers, established scientists and industry
professionals. The results are described in PNAS Nexus today1.

Most researchers are clear in their own minds about what ageing is — but their
perspectives don’t align with those of others, says Gladyshev. “People joke in
the field that there are more theories than people.” Despite this, Gladyshev
says he was surprised by the scale of the problem.

The latest results reflect those of a similar survey of 37 researchers conducted
in 2019 by Cohen and his colleagues2. Now “it’s unquestionably clear that
there’s a huge disagreement”, says Cohen.


WHAT IS AGEING?

When asked to describe ageing, one-third of respondents considered it to be a
loss of function over time, from declines at the cellular level to a decrease in
overall health and fitness. Others saw ageing as a gradual accumulation of
deleterious changes. Not all respondents associated ageing with negative
connotations, with some seeing it as a change in state — reversible or otherwise
— or a continuation of development. And others approached the subject from a
demographic standpoint, describing ageing simply as an increased chance of
dying.


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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-03936-8


REFERENCES

 1. Gladyshev, V. N. et al. PNAS Nexus https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgae499
    (2024).
    
    Article  Google Scholar 

 2. Cohen, A. A. et al. Mech. Ageing Dev. 190, 111316 (2020).
    
    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

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