Ageing is a natural process

Ageing is a natural process....just as you go to bed at night to rest your tired body, and wake up fresh as a daisy in the morning, fully rested. Some age better than others....just as one who knows how to take full advantage of restful sleep to savour the best of the next day!

The benefits of research
Science is beginning to uncover some of the secrets of ageing and the pace of research is hotting up. But don't worry that research will produce a nightmare world in which we all linger longer in a state of advanced decrepitude - the goal of most of this research is to improve the quality of our later years. Already, we're living longer than ever before.
One of the important advances is to get rid of the fatalistic idea that we're 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.

Why we age
The reason we age and die is not that death serves any biological purpose. In past times when lifespans were so much shorter, our genes didn't 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 lead 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 unusual things about ageing is that although we know it will catch up with us eventually, we don't know exactly what lies in store. Some of us may keep our mental faculties largely intact until we're 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's 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, such as Alzheimer's, 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 mustn't 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.

(This article was last medically reviewed by Dr Rob Hicks in May 2005.First published in March 2000.)