Aging biomarkers and the measurement of health and risk

History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 43 (1):1-23 (2021)
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Abstract

Prevention of age-related disorders is increasingly in focus of health policies, and it is hoped that early intervention on processes of deterioration can promote healthier and longer lives. New opportunities to slow down the aging process are emerging with new fields such as personalized nutrition. Data-intensive research has the potential to improve the precision of existing risk factors, e.g., to replace coarse-grained markers such as blood cholesterol with more detailed multivariate biomarkers. In this paper, we follow an attempt to develop a new aging biomarker. The vision among the project consortium, comprising both research and industrial partners, is that the new biomarker will be predictive of a range of age-related conditions, which may be preventable through personalized nutrition. We combine philosophical analysis and ethnographic fieldwork to explore the possibilities and challenges of managing aging through bodily signs that are not straightforwardly linked to symptomatic disease. We document how the improvement of measurement brings about new conceptual challenges of demarcating healthy and unhealthy states. Moreover, we highlight that the reframing of aging as risk has social and ethical implications, as it is generative of normative notions of what constitutes successful aging and good citizenship.

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Sara-Lee Green
Lund University

Citations of this work

Can aging research generate a theory of health?Jonathan Sholl - 2021 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 43 (2):1-26.
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Between hoping to die and longing to live longer.Christopher S. Wareham - 2021 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 43 (2):1-20.
The time of one's life: views of aging and age group justice.Nancy S. Jecker - 2021 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 43 (1):1-14.
The plasticity of ageing and the rediscovery of ground-state prevention.Alessandro Blasimme - 2021 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 43 (2):1-18.

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References found in this work

Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal.Heather Douglas - 2009 - University of Pittsburgh Press.
The Fate of Knowledge.Helen E. Longino - 2001 - Princeton University Press.
The theory of probability.Hans Reichenbach - 1949 - Berkeley,: University of California Press.

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