Can Any Biomarker Predict the Temporal Behavior of Aging?

Journals are filled with articles describing the creation of physiological biomarkers whose temporal behavior is attributed to aging. This paper explores whether it is even possible to create a biomarker capable of describing the temporal mortality dynamics of aging. Just as Medawar referred to aging as an unsolved problem in biology in his classic 1951 lecture, this article suggests that aging remains an unresolved problem in gerontology. The argument is also made that biomarkers of any biological phenomenon must be derived from the logic of an evidence-based conceptual framework or paradigm. As such, the variables used to construct a dataset for quantitative analysis must be related to the subject of interest. It is, therefore, unclear whether a database designed to study disease contains the variables needed to study the mortality dynamics of aging and its biomedical consequences. (C) 2015 S. Karger AG, Basel