What is aging, how does it occur, and how does it express itself in human clinical disease?
Aging is a summary term for a set of processes, which contribute to health deterioration and ultimately to death with the passage of time (calendar age). In other words any process, which contributes to age-related decline in performance, productivity and health is a component of the aging process that deserves our attention and intervention. You can think of aging as a group of processes responsible for such manifestations as increasing risk of frailty, disability, morbidity (for age-related degenerative diseases in particular) and ultimately increasing mortality rates. This interpretation of aging is consistent with general definition of aging system in mathematical reliability theory and reliability engineering as a system demonstrating age-dependent increase in failure rates. Failure is such an outcome when the system deviates from optimistically anticipated and desired behavior (“fails”). The main problem with studying aging is that it is the many-headed monster, with many types o
