What the Exponential Rise in Mortality with Age Tells Us About the Nature of Aging

When charting rising mortality against increasing chronological age, the result is a smooth exponential curve - the Gompertz-Makeham law of mortality. We might well ask how the exceptionally complicated process of degenerative aging, consisting of many distinct mechanisms butting heads and breaking things in a stochastic manner, can produce this outcome. This is one of the questions posed by epidemiologists in today's open access paper. It is a good example that shows how a scientist can hypothesize about the operation of mechanisms given only data on the outcomes of those mechanisms. For context, the authors of the paper here are the same researchers who applied reliability theory to aging some years ago. Reliability theory has historically been used to model the deterioration of complex machinery (such as electronics, and now biological organisms) by assuming the machinery to be collection of various types of redundant parts. Loss of redundancy is the primary form of damage that takes place, and failure occurs when insufficient redundancy remains. Conceptually, this maps well to an organism consisting of cells, or an organ (a liver) consisting of repeated units (such as bile ducts), and so forth. What Can We Learn about Aging and COVID-19 by Studying Mortality? Discussing the age-related dynamics of mortality, we should consider the following relevant question in the study of aging: how is it possible for different diseases and causes of death to "neg...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs