Poor Sense of Smell Correlates with Increased Mortality in Older Individuals

It is quite easy to find correlations between the many varied aspects of aging. People age at different rates, largely due to differences in lifestyle choices: exercise, calorie intake, smoking, and so forth. Genetics are less of an influence. While there is tremendous interest in the genetics of aging, I have to think that this is something of a case of a hammer in search of a nail. This is an era of genetic technologies and genetic data, in which the cost of the tools has fallen so low and the scope of the capabilities has expanded so greatly that everyone is tempted to use it in every possible circumstance. Yet outside of the unlucky minority who suffer severe inherited mutations, genetic variations only become important in later life, and even then the contribution of genetics to life expectancy is much smaller than that of lifestyle choices. Nonetheless, the point is that different people age at different rates. For any given person, however, the many aspects of aging are fairly consistent with one another - nothing races ahead in isolation. Aging is a body-wide phenomenon of multiple processes of damage accumulation that proceed in an entangled fashion, feeding one another and all contributing to systemic downstream consequences, such as chronic inflammation or vascular dysfunction. In this sort of a system, if any one organ or biological system is more aged and damaged in a given individual, then it is very likely that all of the others are as well. This works f...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs