Longevity Versus Frailty

In the most simplistic view, aging is little more than a matter of damage accumulation. The more damage you have, the worse your health, and eventually it kills you. At a very high level, this is in fact the way things are, but living organisms are extremely complex systems, and "damage" is made up of numerous primary causes, direct results of the normal operation of cellular metabolism. These spiral out into hundreds or thousands of secondary and later consequences: further damage, evolved reactions to damage, and so forth. The middle portion of the intricate web of biochemistry that links damage at one side to specific age-related diseases at the other is still comparatively poorly mapped, precisely because it is hugely complex. It is also surprisingly variable from individual to individual, for all that the basic root causes of aging are comparatively simple processes that occur in the same way for everyone. Thus our situation is that frailty in aging is inevitable in the long run for any individual managing to somehow evade all of the late stage system failures of aging that kill without frailty, but over the present median human life span many people do avoid becoming frail before succumbing to those other ends. So there is some distinction between processes of aging and processes of frailty, for all that the latter is absolutely a function of the former. You might consider this to tie back into the fact that genetic differences have little effect on mortality and healt...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs