Lifestyle Choices Do Slow Aging, Just Not as Much as We ' d Like

In recent years, a number of epidemiological studies have demonstrated that people with healthier lifestyles tend to live longer, at least within the bounds of later life from 60 to 100. That in turn is reflected by a lesser burden of various forms of cell and tissue damage, such as the accumulation of senescent cells. This isn't a controversial statement, though there is room enough to argue for an eternity over just how large the effect of any specific choice might be, how that effect size varies between populations, how different choices combine, and so forth. Then on top of all of this, the question of what happens and why in extreme old age past 100 exists in its own realm of comparatively little data because of the low survival to such advanced ages. Arguably we shouldn't much care about centenarians and the fine details of the various lifestyle and biological contributions to their survival odds, as it is much akin to asking why some people managed to die more slowly when infected with tuberculosis prior to the development of effective antibiotics. That question isn't the right focus for the problem. The right focus for aging is on the common root cause mechanisms that conspire kill everyone, and on reversing those mechanisms such that no-one is killed by them. Understanding how some people manage to resist the cell and tissue damage of aging for a longer rather than a shorter span of years is irrelevant in comparison to understanding how to repair that damage. ...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs