LivingSo we could go beyond the limits of aging

So we could go beyond the limits of aging

Aging is a natural and inevitable change that we all experience almost from the moment we are born. Although the current average life expectancy has increased considerably in recent decades, especially thanks to the promotion of healthy habits and the prevention and treatment of various diseases, the truth is that human beings have not managed to go beyond the limits of this unstoppable process.

According to an article that has just been published in the journal Nature Communications , aging is associated with a loss of resilience, that is, the ability to recover from disturbances or episodes of stress. According to the authors, the prevention and cure of diseases has made it possible to extend the average life expectancy, but not the maximum life expectancy, and this is due to the fact that, even for healthy individuals, resilience decreases with age until it reaches a point where the body is no longer able to return to its state of physiological equilibrium after the slightest disturbance.

The team has presented the results of a very detailed analysis of the dynamic properties of fluctuations in individual physiological indices during the aging process. The results show that, as we get older, the time it takes to recover from a disturbance is getting longer: from two weeks on average for healthy adults in their 40s to six weeks for people in their 80s. Furthermore, if this trend remains constant at later ages, extrapolation of the data shows a complete loss of the human body’s resilience at an age between 120 and 150 years. This reduced resilience was also observed in individuals who did not suffer from major diseases, which means that, no matter how healthy we reach those ages, it will cost us more to recover from any minor problems. This could explain, according to the authors, why we do not see an obvious increase in maximum life expectancy despite the fact that average life expectancy has grown steadily over the past decades.

Separate aging and disease

“This work, in my opinion, is a conceptual advance because it determines and separates the roles of the fundamental factors in human longevity: aging, defined as progressive loss of resilience, and age-related diseases, as’ executors of the death ‘once the loss of resilience has occurred. Explains why even the most effective prevention and treatment of age-related diseases could only improve the average life expectancy, but not the maximum , unless they have been developed true anti-aging therapies “- explains Andrei Gudkov, director of the Department of Cellular Stress Biology at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, co-author of this work and co-founder of Genome Protection, Inc., a biotechnology company that focuses on the development of therapies anti-aging.

“Research shows that the recovery rate is an important characteristic of aging that can guide the development of drugs to slow down the process and extend the life span,” explains David Sinclair, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School.

Two aging markers

The authors characterized the dynamics of physiological parameters on human life time scales using a minimum set of two parameters. The first is an instantaneous value, called biological age, and is exemplified in this work with the Dynamic Organism State Index (DOSI). Its value is associated with stress, lifestyle, and chronic diseases and can be calculated from a standard blood test. The other parameter, resilience, is new and reflects the dynamic properties of fluctuations in the body’s state: it reports the time it takes to return to that equilibrium value (DOSI) after a disturbance or stress.

When does aging start?

Age-related changes in physiological parameters start from birth. However, each parameter changes at a rate at each stage of life.

The data in this work show a clear boundary between the growth phase (mostly complete at the age of 30 years). After the age of 40, aging manifests itself as a deviation of physiological indices from their reference values. All of this can be measured, since physiological parameters are naturally subject to fluctuations around the equilibrium level: glucose levels rise and fall after eating, the number of hours of sleep changes each day, etc. To collect all these indicators and accumulate a good amount of data, those responsible for the research took advantage of wearable technology, developing a kind of ‘portable DOSI meter’ in which the physiological parameters of the people involved in the study were recorded.

Intercept the aging process

For the authors, it is not possible to prolong life by preventing or curing disease without intercepting the aging process, the root cause of the underlying loss of resilience. “ We do not foresee any law of nature that prohibits such intervention. Therefore, the aging model presented in this work may guide the development of future therapies to prolong life ”, the researchers explain. “Longitudinal studies offer new possibilities for understanding the aging process and the systematic identification of biomarkers of human aging in large biomedical data. The research will help understand the limits of longevity and future anti-aging interventions. Most importantly, the study can help close the growing gap between health and life expectancy, which continues to widen in most developing countries, ”says Brian Kennedy, Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry and Physiology at the University. Singapore National.

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