Why Do We Age? 🌸

A Battle Against Time ⏱️

Image by Nidia Dias, Visualising AI project by Google DeepMind

So what really is aging?
Is it the fading of that jumpy youthfulness we felt as teens or the sudden back pain and slower recovery in our 30s.

Wikipedia defines aging as ‘the process of becoming older until death’. But honestly, it’s more than just a ticking clock. It’s the slow accumulation of our habits, our genes, the lifestyle we’ve lived and in result the damage that builds up in our DNA.

But if aging is destructive, why hasn’t evolution stopped it? Well, evolution was not aimed at keeping us alive forever but instead was designed to primarily pass on our genes. Hence, once an organism has reproduced, natural selection has little to no reason to maintain it.


The biology of aging is a growing field and scientists have uncovered a few core culprits. Let’s start with one of the biggest ones: oxidative stress.

Oxidative stress is caused by the buildup of free radicals in the body. When we pile up on factors like poor diet, lack of good quality sleep, smoking, excess UV exposure or chronic stress, our bodies start producing too much of these molecules causing an imbalance. The body tries to fight this off by its natural defense mechanisms like antioxidants. However as we age, this balance often tips.

Another reason which we do not completely know if it’s the cause or just a consequence of aging is telomere shortening.

You can think of telomeres as the plastic caps at the ends of shoelaces which keeps our chromosomes from fraying. However, every time a cell divides, these tips get a little bit shorter. Eventually it reaches a point where the cell can’t divide anymore. This is when the cell enters a phase called senescence, where the cell is alive but no longer efficient.

Now this is where it gets interesting …

Senescent cells don’t just sit there quietly. They release inflammatory molecules called SASP signals. Over time, this builds into a stage known as inflammaging which is a low level chronic state of inflammation that lingers in your body without any apparent infection causing it. This is a situation where the immune system stays switched on being an inflammatory loop causing unnecessary stress in the body.

The vicious inflammatory loop — a big target for anti aging therapies.

So maybe aging isn’t just about counting candles on a cake, but a story our body is silently writing every day. We haven’t cracked the code yet, but scientists are already exploring ways to slow it down or maybe even reverse parts of it.

What do you think? If science advances in the future to a level where you could stop aging in your body, would you take that chance? 😇

🔬 Source: Based on findings from Boccardi & Marano (2024) — *The Telomerase Connection*, IJMS. https://lnkd.in/eeqiJrNt