We view aging as inevitable, but it’s actually a treatable disease.

At the turn of the twentieth century in the United States, influenza, pneumonia, tuberculosis and gastrointestinal conditions accounted for approximately 50 percent of all deaths. It was all but inevitable that one person in two would die from one of these afflictions.

Today, only 10 percent of the people in the United States who contract influenza or pneumonia are in any danger of dying, and the country’s mortality rate for both tuberculosis and gastrointestinal conditions is so low that it’s statistically irrelevant.

Thanks to medical advances, diseases that once spelled death are now rarely life-threatening.

What if we thought of aging as a disease, just like pneumonia or tuberculosis? Like any disease, aging presents a host of symptoms, like dementia, organ failure, loss of bone density, just to name a few. Wounds also take longer to heal when we age, our bodies become more susceptible to infections and viruses, our organs slowly yet inexorably fail and our brain function is impaired.

Recent breakthroughs in genetics show that aging actually is a disease. Not only that, it’s a disease that’s potentially curable, and eliminating it would add years to our lifespans. Without the symptoms of aging to deal with, the quality of our newly extended lives would be improved immensely.

Of course, like any disease, aging is best treated not by tackling its symptoms one by one but by targeting its root cause. Cancer provides a useful comparison here. Up until the 1960s, researchers didn’t understand what caused cancer, so treatment focused on symptoms, not root causes. Doctors removed cancerous cells where they found them, often destroying healthy cells in the process.

In the 1970s, molecular biologists discovered the oncogene. This is the specific gene that causes cancer when it mutates. Instead of attacking symptoms at random, subsequent cancer treatments could specifically target the oncogene, leaving healthy cells unscathed and improving patient survival rates.

So why haven’t we done something similar in our approach to aging? Because until now, very little was known about its root cause. However, a spate of recent breakthroughs are bringing scientists ever closer to pinpointing it.

Where do these scientists think the source of aging lies? It’s deep within our genetic makeup, as we’ll see in the next blink.