Aging-related anatomical and physiological changes start several years before the appearance of external signs. Several of these changes start appearing around our forties and continue to do so until our organi...
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There are two main activities we think of when talking about hormones. The first is intracellular and intercellular communication: this communication's quality depends on hormones which will interact not only a...
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They say we are only as old as our arteries, and, with few exceptions, this is true!
The most tragic aspect of cardiovascular diseases, and heart attacks in particular, is their brutality! One minute everythin...
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With time, the immune system becomes less efficient. This process begins when the thymus starts to atrophy, which begins right after puberty. The immune system's decline therefore starts very early on, but its ...
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The brain begins to age very early, and as soon as we reach 25 years of age, the number of neurological connections begins to decrease. From the age of 50 onwards, the weight of the brain decreases on average b...
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Skin owes its elasticity and its resistance to the different layers of tissue which constitute it: the epidermis, the dermis and the hypodermis. The epidermis, the skin's outer layer, makes it waterproof and ma...
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Adult stem cells are of major importance to tissue function. They insure homeostasis, that is, proper balance between the death of cells and the life of those meant to replace them. But they only produce the ty...
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We have seen, in the first part, that aging was caused by the organism's insufficient defenses when faced with repeated and increasingly frequent attacks on our DNA, which will, by duplicating itself when it is...
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Most people have never heard of methylation, and yet we would all be dead without it. It plays an essential role in our organism's proper function.
Yet it is a double-edged sword, and abnormal methylation can ...
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The general public, as well as a significant portion of the medical community, is still generally unfamiliar with chronic inflammation. Illnesses such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's disease, o...
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Dr. Bruce Ames calls mitochondria the weak link of aging. He says that mounting evidence shows that the deterioration of mitochondria is one of the major causes of aging. He thinks that the accumulation of dest...
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The human body needs oxygen to live. Most of our body's functions use oxygen to produce energy. This energy enables our organism to function and therefore live. However, part of this oxygen isn't used properly,...
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Most damage sustained by our DNA is due to four main factors: oxidation, an ubiquitous feature of chemical reactions, leading to the presence of free radicals and oxidative stress; glycation due to excess sugar...
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According to the British journal The Lancet, lack of physical activity is responsible for one out of every ten deaths in the world, about as many as tobacco or obesity. In 2008 alone, physical inactivity would ...
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Atmospheric pollution has become a major health problem. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) are a category of pollutants associated with vehicle exhaust, urban heating, and industries using coal and petrole...
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The entire organism's activity depends on what it eats. Proper DNA replication, just like any other biological function, is therefore related to proper nutrition. Poor nutritional habits can lead to the activat...
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UV rays can damage DNA, RNA (DNA's messenger) and proteins. Ultraviolet radiation emitted by the sun is classified into three types of rays: UVA rays, whose wavelength is between 400 and 315 nanometers, UVB ray...
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Infections, even if they leave no lasting damage, always bring about the death of a certain quantity of cells. Each infection will demand the mobilization of a very large number of lymphocytes and our immune sy...
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The longevity of Bible characters, as mentioned in the book of Genesis in the Bible is the source of a myth, some have concluded that embodied the dédivinisation of man, c that is to say the passage of the myth...
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Health is defined today as our organism's adaptability to multiple and constant changes. This adaptability is effected through a coherent, complex and very efficient organizational system, which results in a pe...
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Michael Meaney and Gustavo Turecki, researchers at the Douglas Institute (Canada), have proven this in spectacular fashion in the past few years; according to Turecki, not only does the environment have an infl...
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Throughout their lives, living beings suffer many different kinds of damage which their organism attempts to rectify through its defense and repair mechanisms. At some point however, these mechanisms no longer ...
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