Osteoporosis

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 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 […]

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 […]

What IS aging? An explanation of aging must account for all cells, all organisms, and – if we are candid – all of biology and isn’t merely entropy. Prior posts defined our boundaries: what we must include – and exclude. We know that we cannot simply point to entropy, wash our hands of any further […]