Aging & Gerontology

Possible strategies to improve recruitment of older people to clinical studies include abolishing age limits, reducing exclusion criteria, and allowing sufficient study time (to recruit and deal with older patients) and money (for reimbursement of their participation costs) in study protocols. Through surveying age ranges and using appropriate survey questions to identify the age demographic of the people who took your survey, you can potentially gain a lot of valuable detail during analysis of their feedback to reveal if there is a strong correlation between age and subsequent opinions and behavioural. Aging clinical and experimental research offers a multidisciplinary forum on the progressing field of gerontology and geriatrics. The areas covered by the journal include: biogerontology, neurosciences, epidemiology, clinical gerontology and geriatric assessment, social, economical and behavioral gerontology. “Aging clinical and experimental research” appears bimonthly and publishes review articles, original papers and case reports.

Age diversity in clinical trials benefits both the patient experience and the success of the trial. The goal of clinical research is to develop treatments that help patients and gain FDA approval. Researchers need not shy away from including diverse patient populations, but they may need to revise their recruitment and retention strategies to be more inclusive, accommodating, and protective of those that are more vulnerable. With the FDA paying close attention to age diversity in clinical trials, it makes good business sense to study a drug within all of the patient populations that may need it. Interventions aiming to slow, stop, or reverse the aging process are starting to enter clinical trials. Though this line of research is nascent, it has the potential to not only prevent prolonged human suffering, but also to extend human well-being. As this line of research develops, it is important to understand the ethical constraints of conducting such research. This paper discusses some of these constraints. In particular, it discusses the ethical difficulties of conducting this research in a way that would produce reliable data regarding the effectiveness of an anti-aging intervention. Clinical trials of such interventions, I argue, will be faced with a dilemma between two confounding variables. Eliminating the variables requires introducing ethically problematic research practices. Thus, researchers must either perform research in ethically problematic ways, or forego the conduct of high-impact clinical research on anti-aging interventions.