“I mean,” she [Alice] said, “that one can’t help
growing older.”
“One can’t, perhaps,” said Humpty Dumpty, “but two
can. With proper assistance, you might have left off at
seven.”
—Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Although conceptions of aging differ among lay persons and even among scientists, we all know that aging accelerates as time progresses. But aging is more than just the passage of time. It is a number of different processes taking place in our bodies, the totality of which is what we mean by aging (lack of strength and endurance; loss of ability to resist disease, including cardiovascular disease and cancer; wrinkling and sagging of skin; loss of hair and teeth; and other familiar aging signs). Before we can do anything about aging, we have to know what we mean when we refer to “aging.” The most important factor in solving a difficult problem is often defining exactly what problem you wish to solve. Here is what we mean by “aging” when we discuss how it is possible to slow and even partially reverse important aspects of the aging process.
A reasonable definition of aging is the increased likelihood of dying from almost any adverse situation; that is, a minor infection, uncomplicated surgery, etc. Aging is a progressive impairment of physiological functions that reduces the individual’s chances of continued vitality and survival. But
there is more to it than that. Aging means different things to different people, even to different scientists. To the very young, aging is something that will not happen for a long time. To the elderly, functional decrements are a way of life and accepted as a result of the passage of years. In the minds of most people, aging is a process associated with the clock.
Time passes and we age and die. An English insurance actuary, Benjamin Gompertz, formulated in 1832 a simple mathematical rule describing the increasing probability of dying with time. The Gompertz law states that the probability of dying roughly doubles every eight years after puberty.
The rate of aging depends on the relationship between the destruction and repair of tissues, cells, and molecules within the body. As destruction and repair take place in the body even before birth, aging is a process occurring not only in the old but continuously throughout our lifetime. As time
progresses, the repair/destruction ratio declines because older individuals are less able to repair the accumulated damage of the years and because the unrepaired damage promotes more damage. Physiological functions decline and we perceive that aging is proceeding. A good analogy is the way your
car ages. When your car finally collapses, you cannot ascribe its demise to just a single factor. Many functions decline over the years and, even toward the end, the car may run well in easy circumstances (such as on a level road) but be hard pressed in a difficult one (such as climbing a steep hill). Eventually, a final load placed on the weakened car’s system ends
its useful life. The final stress may be one that, in youth, the
car could have handled easily.
Aging increases in rate as time passes. Note that functions can degrade over a long period of time before survival is threatened. We are all familiar with
the fact that some people at the age of sixty are not as healthy or as able to perform various physical tasks as other sixty-year- olds. Aging proceeds at different rates in different people.
The traditional Western attitude toward aging—to deny it as long as possible and then resign yourself to the old folk’s home and the cemetery—was pretty sensible until recently. This attitude can now cost you many years of productive and healthy life. As a result of scientific life extension research, we no longer have to accept passively the unpleasant consequences of aging. Scientific data exist demonstrating that some aspects of aging can be slowed down and even reversed. We now know that aging is not a single process, and that different systems age at different rates within the same individual. Often the limiting factor for survival is a single faulty system—as is the case when relatively young persons die of heart attacks. Although the average rate of physiological decline is about 1 percent per year, some body systems age faster than others. In subsequent posts we will discuss what can be done to slow or reverse aging in particular systems.
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