If you are over forty years of age, give or take, you have begun to realize when you cut your finger, bruise a leg or hurt your arm, you don't heal as fast as you used to. Under the rules of programmed cell death, the explanation for this is that you start off life with, say, 100 cells designated as "healing cells". Some will
die off during the early years, so that by the time you are twenty-five, you have lost 10. By thirty-five years of age, you have lost an additional 10 healing cells. By the time you are forty, you have lost an additional 15.
You may have noticed, first, that the loss of healing cells is increasing as you get older. And you realize that while you started with 100 healing cells, you are now down to 65. The simple truth is that 65 healing cells can not do as good a job as 100 can. Nor can they do it as quickly.
Let's take a different type of cell now, say heart cells. We'll start with the same 100 cells, but this time, (remember, this is just a hypothetical example) I will tell you that research shows you need at least 65 good heart cells to keep your heart pumping the amount of blood your body needs to stay active and healthy. And suppose I tell you that research shows once you get
below 30 heart cells, your heart will no longer be able to function at all. You will die at that point.
In the example above, you are just entering mathematical middle age. Now it occurs to you that you are already at a critical point in you life where you heart is no longer able to keep you strong and vibrant. You are starting to "slip down the tubes" and you're only forty!
It is not my intention to depress you, but to make you more aware that the process of "slipping down the tubes, health wise, is nothing more than just another chronic degenerative process.
When you are twenty, you have al the cells you need; once you hit around forty, you are starting to feel the effects of too few cells in critical areas.
There is another, perhaps more scientific explanation I should tell you about.
DNA scientists at Sydney University in Australia have been mapping human DNA. They are tracking the decay of DNA chains and aging, and their research shows that at certain ages, our DNA reproduces with more
errors, or loss of information through different age levels. |