Aging. Polymorphism, compartmentalization and environmental impact.

The proportion of elderly in our population is steadily increasing and so is the need to provide sophisticated health care. We must intensify research which provides results, leading to the design of preventive medicine, before the increased proportion of aged causes a crisis in our health care and social systems. The potential impact of such research represents the best and most cost-effective means of preparing for the future, and providing directions for a better quality of life with reduced chronic and debilitating illness for the elderly. Indeed, prevention appears to be the only approach able to lower the enormous economic burden of the cost of geriatric medicine [1,2]. There are many precedents in medical research for preventive measures being much more cost-effective than therapeutic means: one of them is immunization against poliomyelitis as an alternative to development of improved models of iron lungs.