Aging is an Inflected Cascade Disorder — Nichola Conlon
Channel: Hyper Wellbeing
Date: 2020-08-25

Twitter @hyperwellbeing

"What you find is that these hallmarks then go out and influence other things, and eventually you get in a case where the original hallmark [is] making more things worse. 

This is then going back in influencing the first thing, making that even worse. And what you find is that this means aging is driven by multiple vicious cycles.

As a network scientist we like to refer to aging as what we call an inflected cascade disorder. Essentially what that means is that the system is running smoothly. One thing goes wrong, this has a cascade effect; it impacts a lot of other things. These things start going wrong and eventually the feedback under the first thing and make the whole system even worse.

And because of this aging demonstrates exponential progression. Aging is not linear and unfortunately in reality this means that our next five years of our life is going to be markedly worse than the last five years of our life.

So already at this sort of high-level view what you can see is that aging is very complex but actually this is a very simplified version because underneath each of these hallmarks of aging, we've got hundreds - even thousands of proteins that are all talking to each other in complex networks.  

So this tells us that if we want do anything to try and slow or try and reverse the effects of aging then it's going to be quite a difficult job; we're going to have to do multiple things to try and have any impact."

— Nichola Conlon (CEO/Co-Founder, Nuchido)

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If you liked this clip, you may like our 'Quantified Health, Wellness & Aging' podcast. Please see: https://podcast.hyperwellbeing.com/


Video sourced from 'Nichola Conlon at Undoing Aging 2018' - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAzUnKyLQds