The Mechanics of Kidney Aging

As examinations of aging go, this open access overview of kidney decline and kidney disease is more focused on the mechanics of the problem than most, which makes it an interesting read. As a bonus, it opens by touching on the thorny topic of whether aging is a disease, and where the arbitrary boundary lies between aging and disease. Kidney disease is not as large a problem in our species as heart disease and cancer, but that is only because most people are killed by something else first. Age-related fibrosis eats away at kidney tissue until there is no longer enough left fully functional to do its job. It is an unpleasant decline, and modern medicine has little in the way of effective interventions. It is to be hoped that near future therapies capable of clearing senescence cells will have a significant positive impact on fibrosis in all organs, and thus prove to be useful treatments for kidney aging, but the proof of that remains to be accomplished. Aging is a universal biological phenomenon, except perhaps in the genus Hydra, which appears to be immortal. As such, it is difficult to label aging as a disease, at least when a departure from "normality" is a criterion for a disease. The fundamental processes responsible for aging are still incompletely understood, but environment, genes and chance all play important roles. These processes can be accelerated by diseases which tend to aggregate in older persons, such as diabetes, cancer, hypertension and atherosclerosi...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs