When do we start to die?

[Jon Corby]

Is there a single point from which it is all downhill? Or is it a more gentle curve where we are at our peak for a large number of years? Or is physically deteriorating separate from actually dying, in that if somebody was kept in a sterilised bubble they wouldn't submit to a transmitted disease because of their weakness?

Does science have a good understanding of aging/dying?

[Mark Deeks]

Someone once told me that life gets better every day until you're 60, and then bits of the body stop working. So a 60 year peak sounds good to me.

[Zarte Siempre]

About 14.

[Gavin Chipper]

I think this is quite a good question. I think some people have this idea that you're born, you develop until you reach some sort of peak (maybe somewhere between 18 and 30 - I dunno), and then you start to deteriorate. But I think this is over-simplistic. I don't think the human body just starts to age at some arbitrary point. It's doing so from the moment you start to exist.

When you're young you're also developing physically, so overall you have a "net gain", which means that your development is outpacing your ageing. But As you cease to develop physically, you start to age more noticeably. So you could talk about some physical peak where development and ageing exactly cancel out but I think this would be over-simplistic as well. I think different functions have peaks at different ages.

But does ageing mean that you are dying? Well, if you don't get any other specific diseases, ageing will catch up with you and you will die of "old age". So arguably you are dying from ageing from the moment of conception, but it's just a very slow process. If you don't count that, it would be very difficult to pinpoint a specific time when you start to die. Obviously people that get picked off by specific diseases can look at the time they got the disease. But even then, it might have a long incubation period, so when do you start the clock?

[Jon Corby]

Yeah, you've captured the essence of my question(s) well there Gev, I was thinking exactly along those lines.

Do you die of "old age" though, or is that just a simplistic way of saying "you got so weak that something really trivial was actually able to finish you"?

[Mark James]

There was an episode of QI where they said that the cells in your body are replaced, some at different rates, but that on average the cells in a human body are between 7 and 10 years old. However the cells are replaced in a aged state so I reckon you start dying when the first cell regenerates in this aged state.

As for dying of old age I reckon you're right Jon. The aged cells will make you weaker and more susceptible to something else. It could still be classed as dying from old age though but more colloquially than medically. Like say smoking can damage someone's cells and you would say they died from smoking, thus aging can damage cells so you died from old age. From some of the articles I've read on the subject though, "old age" will never appear in the cause of death section of a coroner's report in the same way "smoking" wouldn't. It would say lung cancer or whatever.

[Mark Deeks]

^ Does happen, that. My nan's coroner's report gave her cause of death as 'old age'. The coroner's argument was that she was 90 and thus it didn't really matter. True up to a point, though it was probably about 4.55pm on a Friday when he did this.

[Gavin Chipper]

Yeah, you've captured the essence of my question(s) well there Gev, I was thinking exactly along those lines.

Do you die of "old age" though, or is that just a simplistic way of saying "you got so weak that something really trivial was actually able to finish you"?

Yeah, as Mark James says, you don't really die of "old age". Different parts of the body lose their functioning at different rates so if you don't get an infection that finishes you off in your weakened state, whatever essential part of your body that ceases to function first is probably going to be what kills you.

[Jon Corby]

^ Does happen, that. My nan's coroner's report gave her cause of death as 'old age'. The coroner's argument was that she was 90 and thus it didn't really matter. True up to a point, though it was probably about 4.55pm on a Friday when he did this.

Sounds like the coroner was covering up something, either for his own ends or because he'd been paid off/threatened. I would not have just left it at that if I were you, but then I loved my nan.

[Mark Deeks]

heh

[Ian Volante]

Replication of DNA isn't 100% efficient, and mistakes usually get chopped out, resulting in shorter telomeres and poorer quality cells. Or the telomeres get shorter, or do the chopping, or something. I think some random combination of the previous sentence is at least partially relevant.

[Jon Corby]

Replication of DNA isn't 100% efficient, and mistakes usually get chopped out, resulting in shorter telomeres and poorer quality cells. Or the telomeres get shorter, or do the chopping, or something. I think some random combination of the previous sentence is at least partially relevant.

Yeah, now you're talking about stuff I don't really understand (I knew me mocking Susie for not having heard of meiosis would come back to bite me). Is this thing you describe effectively "ageing" (aging?) then? So if we could 'fix' that, there would be no ageing? Would we continue to get bigger/stronger, or as Gev says, are the two things separate (i.e. ageing isn't part of the same process as growth) ?

[Ian Volante]

Replication of DNA isn't 100% efficient, and mistakes usually get chopped out, resulting in shorter telomeres and poorer quality cells. Or the telomeres get shorter, or do the chopping, or something. I think some random combination of the previous sentence is at least partially relevant.

Yeah, now you're talking about stuff I don't really understand (I knew me mocking Susie for not having heard of meiosis would come back to bite me). Is this thing you describe effectively "ageing" (aging?) then? So if we could 'fix' that, there would be no ageing? Would we continue to get bigger/stronger, or as Gev says, are the two things separate (i.e. ageing isn't part of the same process as growth) ?

I'd say the two things are different although slightly correlated. Improving the length of telomeres (which I remember as being a key factor) would mean that the cells would effectively stay younger/have a low rate of damage/mutation, and that in turn would enable the body to be bigger/stronger etc. Although growth I'd suggest is more a factor of quality of nutrition and activity rather than age.

[Mark James]

This thread started a conversation between me and my ma. She's an alternative health moron and was giving me all these mad reasons of why we get sick and die and how death isn't supposed to happen, oxygen and magnets can cure cancer, the body's ph levels cause most illnesses and when we finally change our frequency and evolve to the forth dimension we wont get sick and die anymore. Which was nice.

[Lesley Hines]

Hello apterites. It's threads like this make me realise how much I miss you guys

[Ian Volante]

Hello apterites. It's threads like this make me realise how much I miss you guys

Come back and play then!