There is a good technical reason for the present state of medicine for age-related disease, which is that it overwhelmingly addresses proximate causes rather than root causes. Near all treatments attempt to mess with the complex disease state in a late stage of its progression, or in some way compensate for loss of function by adjusting other processes into a higher state of activity. It is expensive, error-prone, and the gains are tiny. The underlying root causes continue to run forward unaddressed.<p>The research community has only just started the transition into treating root causes, which is to say the aging process itself, the accumulating forms of cell and tissue damage that are fundamental, not caused by anything other than the normal operation of metabolism. There are initiatives, some of which have reached the stage of clinical translation, but they are only a tiny fraction of the overall expenditure at present.<p>This will change over the next decade or two as the first results for fundamental damage repair (e.g. senescent cell clearance) become compelling enough and widely known enough to shift the entire field in the right direction.