Researchers studying ageing disagree on just about everything — including what ageing is, whether it is a disease and when it starts — according to a survey of about 100 scientists working in the field.

A key goal of ageing research is to help people live longer, healthier lives. But the exact causes of ageing, as well as effective approaches to slow or reverse it, remain elusive.

For the field to tackle these challenges, researchers need to speak a common language, says Alan Cohen, who studies ageing at Columbia University in New York City. “There doesn’t have to be perfect consensus, but we need to sort things out quite a bit,” he says.

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