Ever seen the 2015 romance-fantasy movie titled "The Age of Adaline"? The story was about a 29-year-old lady who had a car accident on a bridge during a snowstorm at night. Her car plunged into the river and she died and resurrected even before the paramedic team showed up. As weird as that sounded, it's science fiction so anything goes. What happened in-between her death and resurrection was that she got struck by lightning and it revived her and mutated her genes in the process. Adaline was never the same again, She didn't age a day after that, and lived on for years to see even her daughter becoming a grandma.
The age of Adeline.
The movie lacked depth in the science fiction as it was mainly romance. the theory proposed by the producer was that the lightning bolt must have changed something in her genes or metabolism and somehow she just couldn't get older.
Paraphrasing from Scienceandfilm.org;
Do you think that the human body with the advances of science and technology could live another 100 years? Could we theoretically re-engineer our cellular structure so we could live to be 200 years old?. Is there potential for humans to become immortal? -
As intriguing as immortality would sound, it is a story for another time for me. Today, I want to look at the process of aging and the science behind it. Let's get to know the factors responsible for Grandpa being Grandpa. Is it possible to "slow" or probably stop the ageing process?. Is there a different way to look at it.
According to Wikipedia, ageing is simply the process of getting older. It is the collection of changes that render living things progressively more likely to die. As we live each day, there's an accumulation of changes that give rise to deterioration of our internal and external organs. These organs work till they are gradually worn out or ineffective, and the resulting effect on us is that the human metabolism slows down towards an advanced age, say from about 50 to 60 to years.
But deterioration doesn't start from birth. there's constant building of cells and increase in size at first. this process is called growing. below is a growth curve that shows the likelihood of death as age increases in humans.
As evidenced in that graph, the mortality rate is high for infants and quickly reduces as we go towards the prime of our lives (early youthful ages), and then gradually increases again as things progress.
WHY DO AGING OCCUR?
Let's blame on oxygen -our life-giving gas- and its radicals, and then on radiation, and then on you, -your feeding and resting habits.
Ageing is evident on the skin as wrinkles.
There's a couple of reasons why living things age. And I'd probably bore you today with a lot of talk about the many proposed theories like the actions of free radicals, genetic mutation and the oxidative damage theory. However, borrowing plain and simple texts from the oxidative theory, one of the reasons we we age is that as we live and burn energy, the process leads to the production of ROS (Reactive Oxygen Species) molecules, which damages protein and DNA and leads to ageing.
There are a lot of factors that influence the body's aging proces. First off, as we grow older, a couple of cells become less responsive and gradually function at sub-optimal levels. And our bodies creates nonfunctional cells on daily basis. these non functional cells increases over time, clogs up things, and would sometime interfere with normal cellular processes.
Exposure to radiation is dangerous to cells.
Then there is cellular down-regulation of our natural oxidative enzymes, which tends to render our antioxidant defences less effective. Malnutrition plays a major role in this case, as some foods lack the essential vitamins and minerals. When cells do not get the proper nutrients required for functioning, repair and reproduction, we age faster, and plants wither.
Exposure to low or high frequency electromagnetic or nuclear radiations from electronic gadgets , power lines, cell phones and radioactive substances are a substantial part of the aging process. Cells lose their ability to reproduce when affected by radiation and healing of wounds would take forever.
THE FREE RADICAL THEORY:
There really is a good reason why it is called "Free" and "radical". partly because these atoms are floating around in the atmosphere, and do come around unwanted anyway. It is the most acceptable theory of aging. Basically, these substances called free radicals contain some weird atoms of oxygen with single electrons in their valent shells, these electrons are usually short-lived (living for about one-millionth of a second) and are very much willing to pair with anything that has an electron.
Free Radicals attack cell cause them to die permanently by pairing to these cells for an extra electron. Our collagen fibre (Which is the skin's support structure) is constantly being bombarded by radical molecules which of course after several years, will cause the collapse of the collagen fibre cells, leading to wrinkles on the skin as well as an increased rate of skin cell division, making it flatten and thin out and we look older.
Apart from these atoms being present in the atmosphere, the sun's UV light and a lot of other factors like pollution, stress, smoking, etc, are also sources of free radicals.
Did you know that smoking a simple cigarette generates trillions of free radicals.?
Hence, smokers may look a bit older than they're supposed to.
Though it may seem like the theory is largely focused on the largest organ in the body, (the skin), It also has a lot more to do with the internal cells and organs too.
Free radicals are created as by-products when the mitochondria produce cells each day, However, our natural defense system tries to 'mop-up' these toxins before they get busy with destruction. However, with time, our defence system wears out gradually due to down-regulation, and the mop-up process become less- effective.
Damages to our skin cells make the mitochondria in cells work harder to reproduce and make up for the losses. This sometimes could lead to DNA shortening in these cells and could accelerate cell death in them as well. These cells may not live for longer. Little wonder why we have wound marks from our childhood days.
SLOWING DOWN THE AGEING PROCESS.
Slowing down the process of ageing.
Several research ideas are ongoing to curb the rate of ageing. Whether it's on genetic or dietary interventions, anti-oxidation, cellular re-engineering or calorific restriction, scientists has been known to increase the lifespan of some lab animals like the mice for a few weeks or days. And unlike what our movie suggested, lightning bolts are very much unlikely to help at all with the slowing down of aging.
As earlier stated, DNA shortening and mutation could lead to aging. Hence, one thing we could do is to make sure DNA remains intact.
Let him go bro. here's as extra one!
Also, since the anti-oxidative cells become clumsy and lazy to mop up, taking antioxidants as supplements to help donate electrons and keep these free radicals from harming your cell for its energy is an area we should consider. Also, substances such as the activated charcoal could help clear off extra cells and unwanted toxins. Health and fitness exercises would help in keeping the body spry and active too, and a balanced and healthy feeding lifestyle should be adopted.
In Conclusion, as seen in all the facts above, as long as there as there is oxygen, there will be aging (as "haem" carries oxygen to the blood, which is required for energy regeneration by the mitochondria)
Sure enough, it is on natures drawing board that we should grow older and die. We might not live as much as 200+ years as our movie cast, Adaline did, but somehow, it's up to us to live a bit more, and last a bit longer. We really could we could age gracefully.
References:
Ref 1, Ref 2, Ref 3