Aging and Disease: 0.1 – A Prologue

• Aging
• Alzheimer's
• APOE4
• biotech
• Curing Alzheimer's
• Epigenetics
• Human Trials
• microglia
• mitochondria
• tau protein
• Telomerase
• Telomeres

Aging and Disease

0.1 – A Prologue

Over the past 20 years, I have published numerous articles, chapters, and books explaining how aging and age-related disease work, as well as the potential for intervention in both aging and age-related disease. The first of these publications was Reversing Human Aging (1996), followed by my articles in JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association) in 1997 and 1998. Twenty years ago, it was my fervent hope that these initial forays, the first publications to ever describe not only how the aging process occurs, but the prospects for effective clinical intervention, would trigger interest, growing understanding, and clinical trials to cure age-related disease. Since then, I have published a what is still the only medical textbook on this topic (Cells, Aging, and Human Disease, 2004), as well as a more recently lauded book (The Telomerase Revolution, 2015) that explains aging and disease, as well as how we can intervene in both. While the reality of a clinical intervention has been slow to come to fruition, we now have the tools to accomplish those human trials and finally move into the clinic. In short, we now have the ability to intervene in aging and age-related disease.

Although we now have the tools, understanding has lagged a bit for most people. This knowledge and acceptance have been held back by any number of misconceptions, such as the idea that “telomeres fray and the chromosomes come apart” or that aging is controlled by telomere length (rather than the changes in telomere lengths). Academics have not been immune to these errors. For example, most current academic papers persist in measuring peripheral blood cell telomeres as though such cells were an adequate measure of tissue telomeres or in some way related to the most common age-related diseases. Peripheral telomeres are largely independent of the telomeres in our coronary arteries and in our brains and it is our arteries and our brains that cause most age-related deaths, not our white blood cells. The major problem, howevere, lies in understanding the subtlety of the aging process. Most people, even academics, researchers, and physicians, persist in seeing aging as mere entropy, when the reality is far more elusive and far more complex. Simplistic beliefs, faulty assumptions, and blindly-held premises are the blinders that have kept us powerless for so long.

It is time to tell the whole story.

While my time is not my own – I’d rather begin our upcoming human trials and demonstrate that we can cure Alzhiemer’s disease than merely talk about all of this – I will use this blog for a series of more than 30 mini-lectures that will take us all the way from “chromosomes to nursing homes”. We will start with an overview of aging itself, then focus in upon what actually happens in human cells as they undergo senesceence, then finally move downstream and look at how these senescent changes result in day-to-day human aging and age-relate disease. In so doing, when we discuss cell aging, we will get down into the nitty-gritty of ROS, mitochondria, gene expression, leaky membranes, scavenger molecules, molecular turnover, collagen, beta amyloid, mutations, gene repair, as well as the mathematics of all of this. Similarly, when we discuss human disease, we will get down into the basic pathology of cancer, atherosclerosis, Alzheimer’s, osteoporosis, osteoarthritis, and all “the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to”. We will look at endothelial cells and subendothelial cells, glial cells and neurons, osteoclasts and osteoblasts, fibroblasts and keratinocytes, chondrocytes, and a host of other players whose failure results in what we commonly think of aging.

I hope that you’ll join me as we, slowly, carefully, unravel the mysteries of aging, the complexities of age-related disease, and the prospects for effective intervention.