Frailty seems a questionable cause in this context. Am in interpreting incorrectly perhaps?
I would think frailty while young might be a symptom of something that leads to death but how do we go from “sturdy” and so healthy and living well (in a functional sense) to old and frail and more likely to die?
The other two, seem more like lottery type cases, yes we all have a probability of contracting some infection or virus that our immune systems just cannot deal with so we die. We have a probability of cancer destroying critical systems. But that doesn’t quite explain the whole aging story to me—why the slow path to what we see physically rather than a sudden break? Or is this inference about how we should observe things missing something you perhaps have bundled into the three causes you mention above I perhaps I should understand why (if I were more knowledgeable on this area)?
I wasn’t trying to describe the root causes of aging. I was trying to distinguish between diseases that are avoidable via lifestyle changes, and age-related diseases that are sufficiently determined by our genes that we’ll need major new technology to avoid them. The latter include things that impair our immune system and repair mechanisms.
My best guess is that the root causes of aging involve some clock-like processes that have been actively selected for different metabolism at different ages. See Josh Mitteldorf’s writings if you want more on that topic.
Frailty seems a questionable cause in this context. Am in interpreting incorrectly perhaps?
I would think frailty while young might be a symptom of something that leads to death but how do we go from “sturdy” and so healthy and living well (in a functional sense) to old and frail and more likely to die?
The other two, seem more like lottery type cases, yes we all have a probability of contracting some infection or virus that our immune systems just cannot deal with so we die. We have a probability of cancer destroying critical systems. But that doesn’t quite explain the whole aging story to me—why the slow path to what we see physically rather than a sudden break? Or is this inference about how we should observe things missing something you perhaps have bundled into the three causes you mention above I perhaps I should understand why (if I were more knowledgeable on this area)?
I wasn’t trying to describe the root causes of aging. I was trying to distinguish between diseases that are avoidable via lifestyle changes, and age-related diseases that are sufficiently determined by our genes that we’ll need major new technology to avoid them. The latter include things that impair our immune system and repair mechanisms.
My best guess is that the root causes of aging involve some clock-like processes that have been actively selected for different metabolism at different ages. See Josh Mitteldorf’s writings if you want more on that topic.