Alyanov Treatment

Alyanov Treatment refers to the anti-reduction oxidization process gene therapy treatment which was devised by Dr. Sir Sergei Ivanovich Alyanov in 397 P.E (2858 A.D) in the Star Kingdom of Aurora. It slows down the natural aging process and raises the average lifetime for a human to between 200-350 years before dying a natural death.

The therapy became available to the entirety of Human Space few years after, and today the vast majority of humans have undergone the therapy.

Background
Human scientists were looking for immortality and longevity for millennia, but none had so far found a treatment which actually worked. Mankind’s life expectancy was at this point in the region of 120 years on average in the pre-therapy age. Gene oxidization had been experimented with for hundreds of years before Alyanov, but none had actually devised an effective process to affect every gene and cell in a human body in a sustainable way for many decades, possibly centuries. Dr. Sir Alyanov had worked on his therapy treatment for nearly three decades, on and off, before he completed it in 397 P.E.

Process
The Alyanov Treatment affects the cellular changes which accompany/cause the aging process and cause them to shut down for up to several centuries. The factors within the genetic code which cause an organism's cells to "forget" how to reproduce themselves perfectly are neutralized, but all other physiological processes continue at their normal rates.

The Therapy slows aging sufficiently so that it appears to be fully arrested for a long period in the person's life. The "freeze" do not last forever, but a Therapy-affected lifespan was in the region of 200-350 years. Aging is 'frozen' at a younger point depending on the treatment version available when the patient is young enough (but not older than around thirty years) to receive the treatment. For instance, the first-generation Therapy recipients would settle at a physical age in their early middle-age for an extended time, while third-generation recipients would appear to be in their late twenties.

The Alyanov Treatment "freezes" the individual at a relatively early stage in its development, but it also prolongs it, and many recipients of the third-generation Treatment experience a much longer than average period of transition and late break out from the adolescent stage. This has caused frustration for many recipients.

Side effects
What happens at the end of the Treatment process is that the neutralization of cellular amnesia wears off and the individual begins aging, at what humans would consider a normal rate, from the point at which the original aging process had been arrested. Thus someone frozen in his/her mid-twenties would probably live at least another 80+ years (given the other medical advances available to them) from the time his/her Treatment wore off.

This does not mean, however, that everyone continue to look all young and unwrinkled just because of the Treatment. Stress, deprivation of both sleep and nourishment, extended periods of intense worry or exertion etc, can cause age-related visual changes in a person. A large number of things can cause someone to be "prematurely" aged, though stress is the most pronounced of these.