Why Ageing and Disease Are Not Separate Problems

We treat Alzheimer's as one disease. Heart disease as another. Cancer as another. We have different doctors for each, different drugs, different awareness campaigns, different charities.

But what if they're not separate problems at all? What if they're all expressions of a single underlying cause?

The diseases of ageing are ageing

"When you reverse ageing, diseases of ageing go away or are cured," says Sinclair. "The diseases that we try to treat individually with different medicines today — Alzheimer's, cancer, heart disease — fundamentally, what's driving a lot of those diseases is ageing."

The evidence for this is striking. A teenager with the genetic predisposition for Alzheimer's won't develop the disease. A young person's immune system will hunt down and destroy the cancer cells that form in their body every day. A 20-year-old's arteries repair themselves efficiently after minor damage. The body, when young and cellular systems functioning correctly, is almost entirely capable of preventing these diseases from taking hold.

It's only when the body ages — when cells lose their identity, NAD+ depletes, sirtuins lose function, and cellular repair slows — that these diseases get a foothold.

Treating ageing treats everything

This reframing has profound implications. Rather than developing individual drugs for each disease of old age — an approach that is extraordinarily expensive and only partially successful — targeting the ageing process itself could simultaneously prevent or reverse dozens of conditions.

In Sinclair's laboratory, this is already happening in animals. When researchers reverse the age of a mouse brain that has been given the genes for Alzheimer's, the disease goes away — not because they treated the Alzheimer's directly, but because the young brain could heal itself.

What this means for supplements

Supplements that support the body's longevity pathways — NAD+ precursors, sirtuin activators, anti-inflammatory polyphenols — aren't just about feeling younger. They're about maintaining the cellular health that keeps the diseases of ageing at bay. Not waiting until you're sick to start caring about your biology. Starting now, while your cells still have the capacity to maintain and repair themselves effectively.