Research into ageing has been neglected for decades because those affected by it were always considered just old and not ill, according to researchers who announced a £5.72 million initiative to improve understanding of what happens when we grow old.
Dr Alf Game of the Biotechnology and Biological Science Research Council told a British Association meeting yesterday that the money would fund 30 projects studying the process of ageing, not the manifestations we see but the biological basis for them.
It was assumed that dementia was just something that happened when one got old until research showed that at least some dementia was caused by a specific disease, Alzheimers, he said.
Life expectancy had been increased by 15 years since the 1930s. "The problem is that this has not been matched by what is called the health span."
An average of 11 of these 15 years was spent ill and disabled, so all that had been achieved was to increase the time people spent with various illnesses, he added. To improve this, researchers had to learn why people aged and what processes this involved.
Prof Pat Rabbitt of the University of Manchester described a study conducted in a Cardiff shopping centre.
Subjects ranged from 12 to 86 years and were subjected to nine experiments which assessed things such as memory, strength and balance. There were no surprises that increased age meant a gradual decline in all of these attributes, he said, but it was wrong to declare all elderly as increasingly infirm.
"Some individuals are very well preserved for a long time," he said. While many elderly subjects did perform poorly in keeping with their age, there were still some "hanging in there" with better results.
The object of many of the studies was to get to the heart of ageing, eliminating the many illnesses that arose spontaneously which had their own causes and courses and to get to the specifics of ageing.
Many age-related changes take place in the body, he said, but perhaps only 10 to 15 per cent of these changes were the essence of the ageing process. "You can refer to that as normal, natural ageing."
If researchers could identify what took place for this fraction of the total, then perhaps they could modify them, Dr Game said.
