From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@www.aeiveos.com)
Date: Tue Dec 07 1999 - 09:57:37 MST
On Mon, 6 Dec 1999, Spike Jones wrote:
> o Leukemia Drug Produces Dramatic Results
>
> http://www.ivanhoe.com/docs/newsflash-monday.html#leukemia
>
> If leukemia suddenly disappears as a life threat, by how much does
> our life expectancy increase? I guess it is scaled depending on one's
> age? spike
Not very much. Leukemia isn't one of the significant cancer risks.
I'm not positive but I believe it affects children more than adults
so you might get a slight boost in life expectancy (saving 1 child helps
more than saving 5-50 adults in terms of Years of Potential Life Lost).
If you get rid of all of the major killers (heart disease, cancer,
diabetes, etc.) you only bump the life expectancy something like
8-12 years. The implication being that we really don't know what
kills the oldest-old. Richard Cutler says everything wears out.
One of the things I'm going to do is review the NIA's 5 year plan.
http://www.nih.gov/nia/plan/stratplan.htm
I urge those of you who really really want to make progress on
understanding aging, to review this and offer them some pithy
comments on anything in their perspective implying that aging
cannot be solved. I suspect the people reading this list
know more about solving aging than most of the peopla at the
NIA. But they are the ones who award the grants, so influencing
them whatever way we can is useful.
Just as a heads up, though I've never read it myself, my understanding
is that the "Mission Statement" of the NIA (as determined by Congress)
roughly translates to "study aging" not "solve aging".
Robert
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:05:59 MST