How Ageing leads to Age-related disorders

Most likely many of you have heard the phrase “born to die”? This slogan has originated from the short poem "Eli Jenkins Prayer" by Dylan Thomas. We can often see such intriguing slogans like this on T-shirts as well as tattoos. This phrase explains a person's view of life or you may say one’s attitude towards their life.

The phrase quite literally depicts that if we are born then we most definitely will end our journey one day, meaning, we will meet our death at one point. But the poet does not specify when and how!!

We are born, then we turn into teens, young adults, adults and so on. Slowly with time we start ageing and as we age we start facing age-related illnesses.
We have seen that the most common ailments in developed nations are cancer, heart diseases, as well as neuro-degeneration, and the greatest risk variable is age. Thus, ageing is detrimental to our wellness, but it can also develop as a result of the deteriorating strength of natural selection at older ages, due to external dangers to sustenance: ageing could then happen as either a side-effect of genetic alterations that reduce health at older ages, or even of natural processes in favor of genetic mutations which boost fitness in the youths although at the expense of a quicker speed of ageing.

The aggregation of senescence, occurring in the cell, is caused by damaging events from both internal and external environments and this is the hallmark of ageing. Physiology is affected by cellular senescence in two different ways. To begin with, an excessive concentration of senescent cells harms tissue repair. Second, necrotic cells produce a high amount of inflammatory substances and have the senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP) that has detrimental consequences for the microenvironment.

Ageing is a significant health factor for a range of severe inflammatory disorders, such as diabetes, cardiovascular illness, atherosclerosis, cognition impairment, cancer, as well as others, especially COPD. It can have a variety of effects on organs in the body, changing their functioning and structures.
Reduced lung performance, respiratory inflammation, higher gas entrapment, a decrease of lung elastic tissue, and growth of the distal air spaces are all signs of ageing. Such pathological symptoms develop slowly and thus are symptomatic for COPD. In reality, the total growth in COPD is most likely linked to community ageing, because this condition primarily impacts the aged, with frequency peaking at around 65 years of age.

Ageing, which was once assumed to be an irreversible, complicated, and lineage-specific mechanism of damage accumulation, has been shown to be controlled by systems with substantial sequence conservation!

All these information point to us that the poet Dylan Thomas was indeed correct in his poem. But there is a giant loophole in that poem and that is longevity, our key to prolong the necessary end. Lets be honest, eternity sounds about nice, but would we like to enjoy our extended time with our loved ones or alone with no hopes to join our ancestors one day?! Its a lot to ponder on, ain’t it?