Age is the main risk factor for the prevalent diseases of developed countries: cancer, cardiovascular disease and neurodegeneration. The ageing process is deleterious for fitness, but can nonetheless evolve as a consequence of the declining force of natural selection at later ages, attributable to extrinsic hazards to survival: ageing can then occur as a side-effect of accumulation of mutations...

Aging and death are two natural consequences to which the human individuals are subject after their birth. Improvement in both social living conditions and health care has led to a greater life span in the world 1, resulting in an increase in periodontal disease expectancy among the dentate elderly 2. Although moderate loss of both alveolar bone and periodontal attachment is common in the elder...

Theories that explain the persistence of ageing in the face of natural selection implicitly assume that there is a genetic basis for ageing. This has now for the first time been shown to be the case in two free-living populations of mammals.

According to the antagonistic pleiotropy theory of ageing, natural selection has favoured genes conferring short-term benefits to the organism at the cost of deterioration in later life. The 'disposable soma' theory expresses this as a life-history strategy in which somatic maintenance is below the level required to prevent ageing, thus enabling higher immediate fertility. It has been argued th...

apparent rise in the incidence of infertility in females and the trend shifting towards delayed child bearing brought up the concept of ovarian ageing. women in their early thirties show poor ovarian reserve which is an entity named as early ovarian ageing. early ovarian ageing is mostly genetically determined, but acquired modifiable factors like smoking, or ovarian surgery have some roles. in...

Ageing is a natural process in living organisms throughout their lifetime, and most elderly people suffer from ageing-associated diseases. One suggested way to tackle such diseases is to rejuvenate stem cells, which also undergo ageing. Here we report that the thioredoxin-interacting protein (TXNIP)-p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase (p38) axis regulates the ageing of haematopoietic stem cell...

Did senescence evolve as a direct result of natural selection in order to limit the life-span or did increases in longevity evolve in the face of random events that ordinarily limit the life-span? The adaptive hypothesis is that senescence is a programmed process which appeared in evolution because a limited life-span has selective advantages for certain species. Non-adaptive theorists hold tha...

Understanding why and how senescence evolved is of great importance in investigating the multiple, complex mechanisms that influence the course of ageing in humans and other organisms. Compelling arguments eliminate the idea that death is generally programmed by genes for ageing, but there is still a widespread tendency to interpret data in terms of loosely defined 'age regulation', which does ...

Cancer is intimately connected with the intrinsic processes of ageing at several important levels. Firstly, incidence rates for the great majority of cancers rise steeply with advancing age. Secondly, there is an important overlap between the roles of molecular damage accumulation in ageing and cancer. Thirdly, there is a powerful inter-species correlation between longevity, rate of DNA repair ...