Hormesis and Aging: What's the Deal?

Our century allows most people of developed countries, and to higher numbers in developing countries, to reach old age. Thanks to sanitation, vaccination, medical care, and social security systems, we all have a good chance to see our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren becoming adults, and they also can see us becoming old, and even very old.

In such conditions, the next main battle is to improve living conditions in Africa and other least developed countries to increase mean longevity, and to improve healthspan of elderly people. This is the job of physicians and of people involved in medical research trying to improve drugs against the consequences of aging on the various parts of the body. Biogerontologists obviously can be of help in this endeavor, but they also have to propose new ways of thinking, in order to discover new strategies to improve life at old age. To use an analogy, it could be said that the best way to discover such new strategies is to think to electricity rather than searching to improve the candle.

The purpose of this book is to try to know whether hormesis could become a means to confine candelabras into the shops of antique dealers, because one has found a better way to provide light.