Heart disease, diabetes, dementia, and skin aging are usually treated as unrelated problems. A growing body of science says that's the wrong way to think about all of them.

Geroscience is the study of aging itself as the shared underlying risk factor behind nearly every major age-related disease. Instead of treating cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and cognitive decline as separate conditions that happen to co-occur in older people, geroscience frames them as different downstream expressions of the same biological process — the progressive breakdown of the cellular and molecular systems that maintain homeostasis [1].

Why this reframing matters

The practical implication is significant: if you slow the rate of aging itself, you delay the onset and severity of multiple unrelated diseases at once, rather than treating each one reactively after it appears [1]. A 2025 review in Cell proposed "geromedicine" as a formal new medical specialty built specifically around this idea — optimizing health and preventing disease by targeting the aging process directly, rather than each disease individually [2].

The honest regulatory gap

Here's the part that explains why this field still feels new, even though the science isn't: aging itself is not currently classified as a disease by the FDA, the WHO, or the EMA. That means there's no established regulatory pathway to run clinical trials that treat "aging" as the target — research has to focus on specific diseases or conditions instead, even when the underlying mechanism is aging biology [2]. A 2025 scoping review of geroscience research found no formal regulatory framework for aging-targeted therapeutics exists in virtually any jurisdiction yet [3].

There is real movement, though: the WHO's ICD-11 classification now includes "aging-associated decline in intrinsic capacity" as a recognized category, officially replacing the vague older term "old age" — a genuine foundational shift, even if the broader regulatory system hasn't fully caught up [3]. There's a useful precedent for how this kind of recognition eventually changes practice: sarcopenia, the age-related loss of skeletal muscle mass and function, went through a similar process, eventually receiving its own dedicated diagnostic code once consensus formed around it — even though measurement standards for it are still being refined [3]. It's a reasonable template for what recognizing aging broadly might eventually look like: imperfect consensus first, formal recognition second, refined standards after that. And the underlying science keeps producing real results: a rigorous 40-month study in primates found that metformin decelerated biological age, measured by proteomic clock, by 6.41 years — currently the strongest pharmacological evidence available for systemic biological age modification in a primate model [4].

This argument isn't new — it's just slow to land

The case for treating degenerative aging as a distinct, treatable medical condition isn't a recent idea. As far back as 2017, researchers were already publishing methodology proposing standardized diagnostic criteria for aging as a condition in its own right, arguing that existing disease classifications weren't equipped to capture it properly [5]. Nearly a decade later, a 2025 review identified four major barriers still standing in the way: a lack of recognition that aging biology itself is a valid target for medical intervention, the absence of clear regulatory pathways to evaluate aging-focused therapies, economic uncertainty around funding trials for a target with no disease code, and — less discussed — a training gap [6].

That training gap is worth naming directly: geroscience is still not well established at the undergraduate or medical-school level, meaning most practicing physicians today were never formally trained to think about aging as a single, unified, modifiable process [7]. New programs are actively being built specifically to close that gap. It's one of the more concrete explanations for why "anti-aging as its own discipline" still needs to be argued for at all, nearly a decade after the case was first formally made — the science moved faster than the pipeline of people trained to practice it.

Geriatrics already lived this exact story

There's a useful precedent for what recognizing aging as its own medical target actually looks like in practice, and it's not hypothetical — geriatrics went through nearly the same arc. As late as the 1970s, there was no recognition of geriatrics as a specialty in the U.S., no designated training programs, and essentially no infrastructure for aging-focused clinical research [8]. That changed largely through the efforts of one physician, Robert Butler, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning book on aging in America helped drive the successful campaign to establish the National Institute on Aging in 1974 — and a further series of Institute of Medicine reports starting in 1978 that laid out, in detail, why the medical profession wasn't equipped for a population that was aging [8].

What happened next is the genuinely instructive part. Institutional recognition came, and came substantially — the NIA's budget now exceeds $4 billion, among the largest of any NIH institute. But formal recognition didn't automatically translate into workforce interest: as of recent tracking, geriatric medicine fellowships fill only about 43% of their available positions, the lowest match rate of all 71 medical specialties tracked, despite decades of funding and institutional legitimacy behind the field [9]. Researchers studying this paradox point to a structural issue: geriatrics was originally categorized as a subspecialty within internal medicine, similar to infectious disease or gastroenterology, rather than recognized as its own distinct discipline from the outset — a categorization problem, not a science problem [10].

That's a genuinely useful cautionary tale for geroscience and longevity medicine right now. Recognition, funding, and even a formal specialty designation don't automatically solve the harder problem of building a pipeline of practitioners who choose to specialize in treating aging directly, rather than folding it into whatever organ system or disease category happens to be more established and better resourced. If geroscience does eventually earn the kind of formal recognition this article argues for, geriatrics' fifty-year head start suggests that recognition alone will be the easier half of the fight.

The money is already moving faster than the medicine

Whatever the regulatory and academic pace of geroscience looks like, private capital hasn't waited for permission. The global longevity market was valued at roughly $27–32 billion in 2025 and is projected to keep growing at a compound annual rate in the high single digits through the mid-2030s [11]. Cellular reprogramming and epigenetics alone captured an estimated $4.7 billion — roughly 62% of all longevity-sector funding — across recent years, with single financing rounds for reprogramming companies exceeding $3 billion [12]. Altos Labs, backed by Jeff Bezos and other high-profile investors, has raised more than $5.5 billion total, making it the most heavily funded longevity biotech company in history [13].

That level of capital is a genuine vote of confidence in the underlying science — but it's also a reminder that funding and clinical validation move on different timelines, and the gap between them can be brutal. Unity Biotechnology, once one of the most closely watched senolytic companies, saw its valuation collapse by roughly 99%, from nearly $300 million to under $4 million, after its lead senolytic candidate failed Phase 2 trials [13] — the same UBX1325 trial failure discussed earlier in this article, and a concrete illustration of how far ahead of clinical proof investor enthusiasm can run. Funding concentration in the sector is also extreme: the top ten deals in a given year typically capture 83-96% of all capital raised, meaning a small number of high-profile bets are effectively setting the pace and visibility for the entire field, for better or worse [12].

None of this settles the deeper question this article has been asking — whether aging deserves formal recognition as its own medical discipline. But it does add a useful data point: the market has already decided, with billions of dollars, that treating aging directly is worth betting on. What's still catching up is everything else — the regulatory pathways, the training pipeline, and the clinical proof strong enough to justify that level of confidence rather than simply reward it.

What this has to do with skin

This is exactly the distinction behind MISOORA's approach from the start: longevity, not anti-aging. "Anti-aging" implies fighting an inevitable enemy with cosmetic force. Longevity science treats aging as a measurable, addressable biological process — the same framing geroscience is trying to establish for medicine as a whole. Skin happens to be the one organ where you can watch this process, and the effect of supporting it, directly.

Honest expectations

• Where the science stands: the mechanistic case for treating aging as a unified, modifiable process is strong and growing.
• Where regulation stands: formal frameworks for aging-targeted medicine are still being built, not yet established.
• What's already actionable: supporting the same biological pathways geroscience studies, through skin — the one place this process is visible and directly measurable at home.

Aging not yet being classified as a disease doesn't mean it isn't a process worth treating seriously. It just means the science is currently ahead of the paperwork.

That gap between what the research already shows and what the regulatory and cultural framing has caught up to is, in a sense, the whole argument for why this deserves to be treated as its own discipline in the first place. The biology doesn't wait for classification systems to agree on a category. It's already measurable, already actionable, and — for anyone paying attention to their own skin — already visible.

That's the real case for taking this science seriously now rather than waiting for the paperwork to formalize it: the underlying biology doesn't care whether a regulator has assigned it a disease code yet. It's already happening, already measurable, and already responsive to intervention — which means acting on what's currently known doesn't require waiting for permission from a classification system still catching up to the evidence.

With love,
MISOORA

References
[1] The New Science of Treating Aging as a Disease. Superpower. 2026. Read the article
[2] From geroscience to precision geromedicine: Understanding and managing aging. Cell. 2025. Read the review
[3] Advancing Geroscience Research – A Scoping Review of Regulatory Environments for Gerotherapeutics. PMC. 2025. Read the review
[4] Beyond disease treatment and prevention: From geroscience and molecular hallmarks to gerotherapeutics and precision geromedicine. JCMA. Read the review
[5] Stambler I. Recognizing Degenerative Aging as a Treatable Medical Condition: Methodology and Policy. PMC. 2017. Read the paper
[6] From promise to practice: Overcoming the barriers to unlock gerotherapeutics. PMC. 2025. Read the review
[7] The Education in Aging and Geroscience Research (EAGR) Program for Undergraduate Students. PMC. Read the article
[8] A Brief History of Geriatrics. John A. Hartford Foundation. Read the article
[9] The Paradoxical Decline of Geriatric Medicine as a Profession. JAMA. 2023. Read the article
[10] Why Is Geriatrics Such an Unpopular Specialty? PMC. Read the article
[11] Longevity Market Size, Share & Growth Report 2035. SNS Insider. 2026. Read the report
[12] Longevity Market Funding Trends (2022–2026). New Market Pitch. 2026. Read the report
[13] Longevity Market Size 2026: $29B | CAGR 8%. New Market Pitch. 2025. Read the report

Disclaimer. MISOORA products are cosmetics. They are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease, and nothing here is medical advice. The research cited describes geroscience and aging biology in general and is not a clinical trial of this product. If you are pregnant, breastfeeding, taking medication or under medical supervision, consult a healthcare professional before use. Full ingredient list is published on the product page.