2024-01-26 04:03:51
In some people the heart ages quickly, in others the immune system. There is therefore no passe-partout solution to aging. Learning to accept is the key.
When people think about themselves in the future, something curious happens. They do not activate areas in the brain that play a role in dealing with their current self, but areas that also wake up when they see BVs, for example. Our brains apparently see imaginary images of ourselves in the future as strangers. It may have something to do with the fact that for most of human history we lived much shorter lives than we do today, and had to be almost exclusively concerned with survival. Dreaming of a dignified old age was out of the question. The luxury of being able to sit and muse is probably very recent in evolution.
However, it would be useful to regularly reflect on our vision of the future, on what we will look like and how we will behave in the future. According to an analysis in the magazine New Scientist, it could get us out of the damned short-termism that is so destructive in the fight against environmental problems such as global warming. But it could also help you grow old with dignity. Growing old is inevitable if disasters don’t happen along the way, so it’s best to prepare for it. Quite a few people who persistently put it off fall into a deep hole when they have to retire.
New Approach
In many places in the world, the average lifespan has doubled over the past century and a half, from about 40 to more than 80 years. A consequence that is difficult to counter for the time being is that people spend increasingly longer periods of time in poorer health: about 19 years for women and 16 years for men, who on average still live less long. Then it is important to keep the negative aspects of aging under control as well and for as long as possible.
Of course, science also looks at the aging process and how to counteract it. In recent years, we have seen a drastic paradigm shift: instead of focusing on how we can combat diseases and other inconveniences, more attention is being paid to how we can stay healthy for as long as possible. We go to the doctor when we don’t feel well and then we take pills to get better. But in the meantime it is crystal clear that it is better to organize our lives in such a way that we avoid getting sick as much as possible. It sounds banal and obvious, but it makes a world of difference.
The journal Nature recently highlighted new developments in the medical-scientific approach to aging. This followed the discovery of genes in roundworms, and later also in mice, that help determine how long the animals live. In some cases, a mutation can double their lifespan. People have similar genes, which appear to play an effective role in determining their life expectancy. Eating less, and certainly regular fasting, seems to imitate the beneficial effect of those genes.
Because people find it very difficult to maintain a diet long enough, there is a feverish search for drugs with the same effect. It is an offshoot of the old approach of trying to prolong life through artificial means and keep it pleasant for longer. Why run for an hour every day when you can take a pill that has the same effect on your health? Fortunately, many scientists have taken a different path: the path of paying more attention to lifestyle factors such as diet and exercise, without medical adjustment. Prevention has become a buzzword, and rightly so.
Resistance
There are major individual differences between people in the way they age, genetic and otherwise. Illustrative is a recent study in Nature Communications that shows that the resilience of a person’s immune system in dealing with the challenges of everyday life largely determines how old you can live. Specific properties of T immune cells could even be linked to the differences in striking power.
People with the best resistance are better able to fend off flu and other virus attacks and heal injuries faster than others. They also live longer on average. Women are generally more resilient than men, but in both sexes resilience decreases with age – it is an inevitable process. Yet a fraction of people over 90 can maintain an immune system that is more resilient than that of some young adults. They stay healthy mainly because their body remains able to intervene efficiently when things start to go wrong. They are genetically lucky.
78 organs
A while ago an overview of what scientists call ‘aging types’ (ageotypes in jargon) was published in Nature Medicine. They are based on the observation that not all people age in the same way. They made a subdivision based on which organ starts to work less well. A human body has 78 organs, but they do not age in the same way or at the same rate. For example, you can have old kidneys, but a relatively young liver. Initially, four major organ categories in aging processes were delineated, centered around the immune system, the liver, the kidneys and the metabolic system. For many people, one of those four ages significantly faster than the other.
According to Cell Reports, several organ categories were later added, such as the heart and intestinal flora. Now nine would normally be used. It is expected that there will be no more than twenty, because some organs age in a coordinated manner, especially because they can drag each other down through spill-over effects. Worn lungs can promote accelerated cardiovascular aging, which in turn can trigger muscle deterioration. The organ that ages the fastest will largely determine which aging diseases a person will suffer from. People with kidney problems have kidneys that can be up to eleven years older than their official age, while people with conditions such as dementia have relatively old brains.
In Cell, a study listed elements with which aging processes in organs can be determined and compared. This includes identifying so-called epigenetic marks on DNA: chemical substances that help determine which genes are transcribed into proteins and when. They can also be signals of decline.
It is also useful to explore which proteins a body produces in which quantities. Of 5,000 proteins thoroughly examined, approximately 850 were found to be secreted by one organ. Sophisticated algorithms can link a specific protein composition in a body to the speed of aging processes. They provide a basis for distinguishing between chronological aging (your age) and biological aging (the rate of deterioration, including of individual organs).
Heart failure
An analysis of the evolution of eleven important organs in more than 5,000 people was published in Nature. It quickly became clear that the changes, measured by the protein composition in the body, were also not uniform at all. They differed drastically from person to person, even for people of the same age.
In a body, one organ could actually age noticeably faster than all the others – this happened in a fifth of the people studied. That fact alone was linked to a higher susceptibility to health problems and a shorter lifespan. It was striking, for example, that the 2 percent of people studied with a rapidly aging heart had a 250 percent greater risk of heart failure than the average person of the same age.
The basic conclusion of all the work is that aging exhibits so much individual variation that it is virtually inconceivable that a passe-partout will ever be found to streamline the fight against it. The insight emphasizes for the umpteenth time the importance of personalized medicine: many people become ill in a specific way and deserve adapted treatment to counter their problems. If more attention is paid to avoiding getting sick, there should also be more attention to a personalized evaluation and possible adjustments to your lifestyle to stay healthy for as long as possible.
You can color outside the classic lines. There are people who can perfectly be a little fatter than average without it endangering their health. There are people who can do themselves more harm than good by exercising intensively – if they have a somewhat fragile heart, for example. It also doesn’t always make sense to mentally torment yourself by trying to physically do something that your mind resists. Listening carefully to your body never hurts. And soon, large-scale diagnostic tests will undoubtedly come onto the market that will allow you to gain fairly reliable insights into the specific aging aspects of your body relatively quickly. You can then respond specifically to this.
Fantasizing
Meanwhile, gerontologists emphasize the importance of a positive approach to the aging process. You can’t escape it anyway, so you better come to terms with it. Then it can help to fantasize in advance about your future life as a ‘senior’. That doesn’t have to be doom and gloom. Many elderly people appear to have an easier time mentally after their retirement age than before, because they struggle less with worries about children, work and repayments. It is not surprising that older people become depressed less easily than when they were young. It also seems pointless to obstinately resist the ailments of old age that inevitably arise.
“We too often see aging as something negative, while it is actually good for our mental well-being,” says old-age psychiatrist Mathieu Vandenbulcke (KU Leuven) in the magazine Sonar. ‘Elderly people focus more on the positive aspects of life and are more emotionally stable. Many elderly people face health problems. Resisting this is pointless. People who can let go and adjust their expectations to what is possible are often happier.’
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