Aging as a Multifactorial Disorder with Two Stages

Aging (senescence) is characterized by development of diverse senescent pathologies and diseases, leading eventually to death. The major diseases of aging, including cardiovascular disease, cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), are multifactorial disorders, resulting from complex interactions between multiple etiologies. Here we propose a general account of how different determinants of aging can interact to generate late-life disease. This account, initially drawn from studies of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, depicts senescence as the product a two stage process. The first stage involves the diverse causes of disease prior to aging, that cause disruption of normal biological function. These include infection, mechanical injury and mutation (somatic and inherited). Second, etiologies largely confined to aging: deleterious, late-life consequences of evolved wild-type gene action, including antagonistic pleiotropy. Prior to aging, diverse insults lead to accumulation of various forms of injury that is largely contained, preventing progression to pathology. In later life, wild-type gene action causes loss of containment of latent disruptions, which form foci for pathology development. Pathologies discussed here include late-life recrudescence of infection, osteoarthritis, cancer and consequences of late-life deleterious mutations. Such latent injury foci are analogous to seeds which in later life, in the context of programmatic senescent changes, germinate and develop into disease.