Sundeep Khosla, MD, talks to Endocrine News about his ENDO 2019 plenary talk on treating osteoporosis via cellular senescence with the ultimate goal of making the golden years truly golden with a better quality of life.

JANUARY 2019

“We’re not even focusing that much on lifespan; we are really focusing on health-span. We’re all going to get old, but can we maintain a more productive life for our lifetime, however long that is? Our goal is that whatever time we have, we spend it in the best possible health and productively, so we’re not in a nursing home, and have a better quality of life.”
 

The historical approach is to treat each of the diseases separately — so you take a statin and a blood pressure medicine for cardiovascular risk. You take a different drug for diabetes. That leads to problems with patients as they get older being on many different drugs which causes adverse drug interactions, non-compliance, and so forth.

The concept that we and others are trying to put forward is that you have this constellation of diseases associated with aging like osteoporosis, dementia, diabetes, so forth. But they share the same risk factor, which is aging. So is it possible, instead of targeting each disease separately, can we in fact target a common aging mechanism to maybe try to treat multiple aging diseases? That’s really where the geroscience hypothesis has come about — that we could manipulate fundamental aging mechanisms that will delay the appearance or severity of multiple chronic diseases. Then I’ll move right into our work on osteoporosis and the identification of senescent cells in the bone microenvironment