Osteoarthritis

Aging causes disease. To many people, the relationship is even closer: aging is a disease. The latter view is controversial. Most biologists and physicians would view aging as a “natural process” and contend that “normal aging” is independent of disease. Aging, in this view is not a disease, although it certainly causes disease. They often […]

The human body represents a “system” in the engineering sense: all parts (cells, tissues, organs) are interdependent. To understand how the body functions (and how it ages), we may appropriately study individual cells, but we must also study the interactions between cells. We may start by looking at small communities of cells (local, homogenous tissues), […]

The human body contains perhaps a bit short of 40 trillion cells, which is an impressive number, yet a large part of our body – a quarter to a third, depending how you measure it – isn’t intracellular, but extracellular. This includes not only the fluids within the blood and lymphatic spaces, but the space […]

Changes in gene expression underlie aging and age-related diseases. There is all-but-universal (and equally unwarranted) assumption that both aging and age-related diseases are genetic. We see articles on “aging genes” and “genes that cause Alzheimer’s disease” (or genes that cause heart disease, osteoarthritis, etc.). The reality is that both aging and age-related diseases are not […]

Why do some people age faster than others? We’ve all seen people – high school reunions come to mind – who have the same chronological age, but different biological ages: with the same “age”, one person looks ten years older (or younger) than another. If aging is related to cell senescence and cell senescence depends […]

For those interested in knowing where this blog is going (or where it has been), here is an index of all previous and planned posts for this series on Aging and Disease. Note that the planned posts may change as we progress. 0.1 Prologue 1.0 Aging, our purpose, our perspective 1.1 Aging, what is isn’t […]

Misconceptions regarding the current model of aging are rampant and they tend to fall into one of several categories. These include Straw man arguments, unfamiliarity with how age-related human pathology occurs, simplistic views cell senescence, genes, and expression, or misguided approaches to measuring telomeres (usually in the wrong cells). The Earth can’t possibly be round, […]

How does aging work? So far, in the prologue (section 0) and the section 1 posts, we have discussed a perspective, what aging isn’t (and is), and what we need to explain in any accurate model of aging. In this post, I provide an overview of how the aging process occurs, from cell division to […]

Our understanding is limited by our vision. If we look locally, our understanding is merely local; if we look globally, our understanding becomes more global; and if we look at our entire universe, then our understanding will be universal. When we attempt to understand our world, we often start with what we know best: our […]

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 […]