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While most scientists look at Covid-19 as a viral respiratory illness, Nir Barzilai takes a slightly different perspective. Instead Barzilai, founder of the Institute of Ageing Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, sees it as a disease of ageing.
The grim statistics show that he has a point. In Europe, people over 60 have accounted for 90% of fatalities since the start of August. While the impact of Covid-19 has been universal, older people have been disproportionally affected.
“This virus has no eyes, but it could see immediately who is old and more vulnerable,” says Barzilai.
For Barzilai and other geroscientists - scientists who study the biology of ageing - this represents an opportunity. They have long argued that we need a different perspective for tackling many chronic diseases, from cancer to Alzheimer s. As all of these illnesses become more common with age, geroscientists have suggested that therapies attempting to reverse some of the cellular mechanisms of ageing might make older individuals more resilient to a whole range of diseases. The premise of this approach is that while we typically measure age chronologically, the number of years we have been alive, your biological age says far more about your health. Biological age is indicated through various biomarkers ranging from the length of telomeres - the tips of chromosomes - to changes in DNA expression, and even your gut microbiome.