Quiz: Take Healthy Living for Every Age HERE
An aging body has changed in many ways, and not just in those obvious to visual inspection. The typical old body is identifiably different from the typical middle-aged body at the level of cells, genes and biochemistry: biochemical processes, gene expression, levels of molecular damage, cellular behaviors, cellular populations, and so on.
Some of these differences are clearly causally linked - a wide range of age-related changes can often be shown to be caused by a lesser number of underlying changes. For example, damage to mitochondria leads to oxidization of low-density lipoproteins (LDL), which in turn leads to detrimental changes involved in atherosclerosis, which is the principal cause of coronary heart disease and other forms of cardiovascular disease. Most modes of biochemical wear and tear contribute to a wide range of recognized age-related conditions and frailty.
One role of aging research should be to explore these linkages, so as to better characterize the core of aging; what, really, are the essential changes of aging when all the chains of failure have been cut back to their root causes? Read on
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