The COVID-19 Experience

Maybe surprising to some, COVID-19 has improved my personal life immensely. My life usually includes excessive world travel, jet lag and poor rest, being on constantly, falling behind on many things. This has ended for now and quality of life has improved. Also, I spend more time with my wife, who has as demanding job, and we enjoy our time together, catching up on what we often miss. Lastly, we both had a mild case of COVID-19, donated plasma for antibodies, and so fear of the diseases is behind us and is very freeing.

And now to the disturbing part. The potential for targeting aging and its diseases have matured from hope to promise. COVID-19 has caught us in the transit from promise to realizing it caught us with the best example that shows how biology of aging is determinate to health. People 80 and older die at 200 times the rate of someone in their 20s. The concept here is that its ok to fight the virus but you need to fortify the host, the older adults. We do have drugs that can be administered or repurposed that will increase immunity, decrease inflammation and increase the resiliency of the older body to sustain a severe disease.

The argument against these drugs (such as metformin or rapamycin) is that they have not been studied in this situation. Here as doctor I have a huge ethical dilemma. I do agree that clinical studies are the only way to make sure that something works. But, we are at war and many elderly will die if we do nothing. The reasons to use the drugs now are 1) The risk benefit is low since they have been used in humans. 2) Because we are talking about defending the host- plenty of evidence for that. My frustration is that I cannot push for this concept now and remain a careful scientist. As Victor Hugo said: All the forces in the world are not as powerful as an idea whose time has come. Maybe this can be the time.

Nir Barzilai, Professor of Medicine and Genetics, Director, Institute for Aging Research, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, USA