A Crash Course on Aging

The present review deals with the computer simulation of biological ageing as well as its demographic consequences for industrialized societies.

A simple mathematical model of the aging process for long-lived organisms is considered. The key point in this model is the assumption that the body does not have internal clocks that count out the chronological time at scales of decades. At these scales, we may limit ourselves by empirical consideration only the background (smoothed, averaged) processes. The body is dealing with internal biological factors, which can be considered as the biological clocks in suitable paramet...

There exists compelling experimental evidence in numerous systems for logarithmically slow time evolution, yet its theoretical understanding remains elusive. We here introduce and study a generic transition process in complex systems, based on non-renewal, aging waiting times. Each state n of the system follows a local clock initiated at t=0. The random time \tau between clock ticks follows the waiting time density \psi(\tau). Transitions between states occur only at local cl...

Author's early work on aging is developed to yield a relationship between life spans and the velocity of aging. The mathematical analysis shows that the mean extent of the advancement of aging throughout one's life is conserved, or equivalently, the product of the mean life span, and the mean rate of aging is constant. The result is in harmony with our experiences: It accounts for the unlimited replicability of tumor cells, and predicts the prolonged life spans of hibernating...

The chronological age used in demography describes the linear evolution of the life of a living being. The chronological age cannot give precise information about the exact developmental stage or aging processes an organism has reached. On the contrary, the biological age (or epigenetic age) represents the true evolution of the tissues and organs of the living being. Biological age is not always linear and sometimes proceeds by discontinuous jumps. These jumps can be positive...

The gradual accumulation of damage and dysregulation during the aging of living organisms can be quantified. Even so, the aging process is complex and has multiple interacting physiological scales -- from the molecular to cellular to whole tissues. In the face of this complexity, we can significantly advance our understanding of aging with the use of computational models that simulate realistic individual trajectories of health as well as mortality. To do so, they must be sys...

What is aging? Mechanistic answers to this question remain elusive despite decades of research. Here, we propose a mathematical model of cellular aging based on a model gene interaction network. Our network model is made of only non-aging components - the biological functions of gene interactions decrease with a constant mortality rate. Death of a cell occurs in the model when an essential gene loses all of its interactions to other genes, equivalent to the deletion of an ess...

We present a simple model for biological aging. We studied it through computer simulations and we have found this model to reflect some features of real populations.

Lifespan distributions of populations of quite diverse species such as humans and yeast seem to surprisingly well follow the same empirical Gompertz-Makeham law, which basically predicts an exponential increase of mortality rate with age. This empirical law can for example be grounded in reliability theory when individuals age through the random failure of a number of redundant essential functional units. However, ageing and subsequent death can also be caused by the accumula...

A theory of aging based on the principles of the kinetics of chemical reactions and the rules of natural selection of organisms is proposed. The theory is based on a hypothesis that the biochemical processes in the organism can be described in the terms of chemical reaction kinetics. The evolutionary process of organisms is determined by the goal of continuing life, and the natural selection forced organisms to develop in an optimized way for survival and reproduction, after ...