Anti-aging as a Key Challenge for the Medicine of the Future

The title of this chapter expresses well not only its main idea, but also formulates one of the key ideas of the whole book. Grinin et al. give many arguments in favor of these ideas, and in the last paragraph of this chapter they summarize them. The authors believe that medicine of the future will be cardinally new kind of medicine because of anti-aging technologies, that is, technologies for slowing down and ennobling aging, as well as stopping and alleviating the problems associated with it. All this will become an integral part of the future of medicine; perhaps even reforming whole system of medicine. This will also mean that more and more attention will be focused on the treatment of age-associated diseases, on the cure or mitigating of the so-called geriatric syndromes (or age-related conditions). The perception of aging in society will also change. Thus, the changing focus of medicine on the problems of aging together with innovations in anti-aging technologies will imply a medical adaptation to aging. The latter will develop gradually up to the late twenty-first century and become an essential part of the common process that Grinin et al. have called adaptation to aging.