Most people have probably heard many times the idea that one can "grow old gracefully" and in a healthy way. This message is perpetuated by the fitness and health industry and pension companies love to show the image of happy, relatively healthy 65-year-olds who can finally escape dreaded work and do what they enjoy in life, for at least a few years before a period of serious disability and death.

I'm 25 years old and while society still defines it as "young", it feels a short time since I was a teenager, and a short time until I'm pulled into a new societal, age-related stereotype. A young person is often considered a "fresh seed full of potential ", while already at 40 one might be "too old" for many jobs, in the constant repetitive cycle that is "generational change".

It is true that some people live over a century and delay many specific pathologies. I also agree that it is a more desirable scenario to die frail at 100 than earlier, but the fact is that what we define as biological aging is in itself a pathological problem, a problem that still suffers from a lack of research. While not every age-related change is studied, the damages can be broadly classified into categories, and specific biomolecular problems can be directly targeted.

While there is a small decrease in function between 20 and 40, the human body still remains "very healthy" until mid 40s when disease correlated to the aging process overtakes accidents/suicides as most common cause of death. Keeping the human body biologically under 50 years old would take away the vast majority of all disease, and even if biologically young people were obese and smoked, there would likely only be a small number of cases where these "unhealthy" habits caused lethal health problems.

The problem with WHO and governmental programs is that these systemic pathologies destroying the body and generating ill health in the elderly are not yet considered to be a disease. I have worked trying to change this paradigm. Earlier this year I coauthored "It is time to classify biological aging as a disease", and Alex Zhavoronkov and his company In Silico medicine have recently published a paper on this issue, to persuade the World Health Organisation to classify aging as a disease as a part of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-11).