Theoretical Basis for Anti-Aging Treatments

Xinyan Zhang

7 Feb 2004

Death is an inevitable end of every individual human life and, however, none of us has lived up to our life’s full potential. One of the obstacles in the way to the fullest living is that we still know nothing about the essence of aging and much still less about how to influence its processes.

While aging processes can be divided into three general categories -- genetic, biochemical, and physiological, the theories of aging fall into two categories ⁽¹⁾.

The "programmed" theories hold that aging follows a biological timetable, perhaps a continuation of the one that regulates childhood growth and development. The damage or error theories emphasize environmental assaults to our systems that gradually cause things to go wrong.

Here is a brief and very simplified rundown of the major theories.

Programmed Theories

• Programmed Senescence. Aging is the result of the sequential switching on and off of certain genes, with senescence being defined as the time when age-associated deficits are manifested.
• Endocrine Theory. Biological clocks act through hormones to control the pace of aging.
• Immunological Theory. A programmed decline in immune system functions leads to an increased vulnerability to infectious disease and thus aging and death.

Error Theories

• Wear and Tear. Cells and tissues have vital parts that wear out.
• Rate of Living. The greater an organism's rate of oxygen basal metabolism, the shorter its life span.
• Crosslinking. An accumulation of crosslinked proteins damages cells and tissues, slowing down bodily processes.
• Free Radicals. Accumulated damage caused by oxygen radicals causes cells and eventually organs to stop functioning.
• Error Catastrophe. Damage to mechanisms that synthesize proteins results in faulty proteins which accumulate to a level that causes catastrophic damage to cells, tissues, and organs.
• Somatic Mutation. Genetic mutations occur and accumulate with increasing age, causing cells to deteriorate and malfunction. ⁽¹⁾

The programmed theories and the error theories mentioned above have one thing in common that they all take the aging process as a one-way change, which is to say that we may only become older and older but never younger.

However, according to my theory of life ^{(2) (3)}, living human beings are biological creatures dominated by autumn life, and all autumn lives exist as courses composed of both reciprocating changes and one-way change. The reciprocating changes determine that all organisms of autumn life repeatedly become older and younger in turn during the courses of their existence. And the one-way change determines that all organisms of autumn life will eventually become older and older.

Integrated with the one-way change, the reciprocating changes are virtually dissymmetric between its two phases of opposite changes. The changes along the direction of the one-way change will run longer than the changes against it, which may be called as long phase and short phase. We will be able to slow the one-way changes down if we can make the two opposite phases of the reciprocating changes more symmetrical, either by shortening the long phase or lengthening the short phase. Therefore, anything that has either a positive influence on the changes of the short phase or a negative one on the long phase might in all probability possess an anti-aging potentiality.

There are many treatments that may influence the symmetry of the biological reciprocating changes in our bodies, such as nutrition, sleeping, sport, hormone therapy and so on. However, all of them may bring us not only on becoming younger but also older, dependent on the nature of the influence and, more important, the point of the reciprocating changes at which the influence acts. An anti-aging treatment might fail to achieve an expected effect when it acts on a wrong phase.

Reference:

1. Theories on Aging, http://www.worldhealth.net/p/90,4863.html From The World Health Network, www.worldhealth.net, official website of the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine (A4M) and the Internet's leading portal on aging intervention.

2. Xinyan Zhang: General Definition of Life, http://www.oocities.org/reex9/life.html, 8.2003.

3. Xinyan Zhang: The Fundamental Human Conjecture, http:// www.oocities.org/reex9/en.html, 10.2003.