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UK: What Makes Us Age?
By
Tom Kirkwood
July 10, 2003
UK
- Science is at last beginning to uncover some of the secrets of ageing
and the pace of research is hotting up. You may be worried that research
will produce a nightmare world in which we all linger longer in a state of
advanced decrepitude. In fact, the goal of most of this research is to
improve the quality of our later years. Already, we are living longer than
ever before. Why research?
We need urgently to find ways to slow or prevent conditions like
Alzheimer's disease, osteoporosis and arthritis that make life a misery
for so many older people. In a nutshell, scientists hope to extend the
health span. One of the important advances is to get rid of the fatalistic idea
that we are simply programmed to die when our time is up. This idea has
always been hard to square with the fact that even in old age the body
does its very best to keep itself alive. If we were programmed to
self-destruct after three score years and ten, the programming seems
pretty clumsy. There are neater ways to die than ageing. Reason we age
The reason we age and die is not that death serves any biological
purpose. In past times when life spans were so much shorter, our genes did
not evolve to keep us going indefinitely. When life was brutal and short,
you were more likely to be cut down in your prime by an infection or an
accident. There was no point in building bodies that might last forever.
We live, biologically speaking, with bodies that were designed for the
stone age rather than the 21st century. How we age
What this tells us about the ageing process is very important. As
we live our lives, all kinds of things begin to go wrong within the cells
of our bodies. We have billions of cells. It takes a long time for the
damage to build up to a level where it may harm us. But build up it does -
in time we can no longer overlook it. The fibres of protein that make our
skin and artery walls elastic go through changes that leads to loss of
that vital flexibility. The DNA strands inside our cells get damaged, too.
The cells' energy production systems may ultimately fail. Odd things about ageing
One of the odd things about ageing is that although we know it will
catch up with us eventually, we do not as a rule know exactly what lies in
store. Some of us may keep our mental faculties largely intact until we
are over 100. Others will suffer from dementia. Some of us will still be
able to get about - others with conditions like arthritis will find it
more difficult. How ageing will affect us is partly down to luck - where the damage
strikes first and hardest. Some of it is down to genes and some of it will
be affected by how we choose to live our lives. Researchers are beginning
to look at the genetic contribution to ageing, linked with the human
genome project. Longevity
Long life tends to run in families. Longer lived parents tend, on
the average, to have longer lived children. The risk of age related
diseases like Alzheimer's disease appears also to have a genetic
component. Understanding how genes affect ageing will help us to
understand how the ageing process unfolds. As with all new research that seeks to harness the incredible power
of genetic analysis, we must not abuse the knowledge that will come.
Luckily it appears that the genetics of ageing can tell us only part of
what may affect each of us as we grow old. Copyright
© 2002 Global Action on Aging
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