The Little Things Add Up Over Time

Your body is an integrated collection of systems, all interacting with one another. When any one system becomes damaged and degraded, that change is felt elsewhere. The degenerations of aging are an accelerating downward spiral precisely because our biology is this way: slow at first, accumulated damage in different locations and biological processes feeds on itself. Degraded performance in each failing system causes more damage elsewhere, a feedback loop that moves ever faster as the years pass until the catastrophic end when a critical organ fails.

The way out of this feedback loop is to understand what the damage is and how to repair it. That is presently something that can be partially achieved in mice - for some forms of damage only - and therefore the same is probably possible in humans. No research group has moved much beyond proof of concept yet, even for mitochondrial repair, which is possibly the most advanced area of interest outside the busy field of regenerative medicine.

In any case, here are a couple of examples of the way in which the little things - accumulating damage of the sort you can damp down by taking better care of your health, rather than the sort you can't do much about with present day medicine - can accelerate the consequences of aging:

New evidence from NYUCD supports link between gum inflammation and Alzheimer's disease

NYU dental researchers have found the first long-term evidence that periodontal (gum) disease may increase the risk of cognitive dysfunction associated with Alzheimer's disease in healthy individuals as well as in those who already are cognitively impaired. The NYU study offers fresh evidence that gum inflammation may contribute to brain inflammation, neurodegeneration, and Alzheimer's disease.

Low Blood Flow Ages Brain Faster

People whose hearts pump blood inefficiently may lose brain volume faster, putting them at risk for dementia, a new study indicates. Researchers examined brain and heart MRI data on 1,504 patients without a history of neurologic disease enrolled in the Framingham Offspring Cohort study. The participants, all between 34 and 84 years of age, half of whom were women, were divided into three groups based on the pumping ability ("cardiac index") of their hearts. Participants whose hearts pumped the least amount of blood showed almost two years more brain aging than those with the healthiest hearts, researchers say.

By now regular readers should know that chronic inflammation is not good over the long term, as it is effectively a source of biochemical and cellular damage. So I shouldn't have to say much on that topic. The second article above points to exercise, to my mind at least. Exercise, blood flow, and brain health all seem to go hand in hand, and the beneficial effects of exercise, like those of calorie restriction, appear in nearly every aspect of aging biology examined to date.

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