Medical Xpress November 17, 2025
In 2018, the World Health Organization (WHO) released the 11th edition of the International Classification of Diseases—a global, standard-setting guideline for how institutions should understand and organize health information. In it was a new diagnostic category for symptoms and signs of disease: “old age.”
The new category sparked outrage and, in 2021, the WHO backed down. It replaced “old age” with the more cumbersome but less incendiary category of “aging-associated declines in intrinsic capacities.”
The reversal dealt a blow to scientists who, for years, had fought to have institutions formally classify aging as a disease. Older age, after all, is a major predictor of hypertension, cancer and other chronic conditions. And if we delve into the biology behind this association,...
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