Hi everyone!
EHF Advisor, prof. Arnold Mitnitsky answers questions about aging, frailty index, longevity, mathematical models that help to understand and fight against aging.
Take a look at the first part of his comments.
1. Briefly about myself and why I’m a Team member at eHealth First?
My expertise and research interests lie in the area of mathematical modeling of complex biomedical systems. More specifically, I have a longstanding interests in modeling the process of aging. Being affiliated with the Dalhousie University (Department of Medicine) in Halifax, Canada, I was a recipient of several grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research to find the answer to the following questions: “How can we quantify aging in individuals and population?” How can we understand the biological aging and what is Biological age as a measure of the aging process, and finally how can we assess it? The problem of data integration is the crucial one in this respect, as more data becomes available with the explosion of the new technologies, such as genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and advanced computational techniques, including the Artificial Intelligence (AI). The eHealth First team members have similar expirations and relevant expertise, so I was delighted to joint this team in the development of the approaches to assess health of individuals during aging with the hope that the new approaches will be implemented in practice.
2. What is aging?
Aging is many things (aging is complex and has many aspects) and that is why people who study aging cannot agree all time (rather often). Aging can be defined at the different levels (cellular, subcellular, organ, entire organism). For me, it is a systemic nature of aging that is most important. We can say that aging is the process of changes in multiple aspects of health, declines in functional capacity, and functional reserve, increasing vulnerability to stresses, increasing the level of frailty. My focus is not about semantics but about developing the means that allow to quantify aging. Mathematical modeling lies in the heart of my approach. From that standpoint, we (with my colleagues, geriatrician, professor Kenneth Rockwood) suggested to assess aging as the process of accumulation of health deficits that can be found in multiple databases (clinical, epidemiological, etc.) and we have introduced a measure that can be readily applied to many data to make use of the information available currently and expected in the near future.
3. Why we age?
The opinions about that greatly diverge. There are two major theories of aging: the damage accumulation, and genetic programming of aging. I am in favor of the accumulation of damage approach to the origin of aging, as a cause of aging and that is well supported by our mathematical models, especially the network model of aging that shows how the propagation of damage occurs in complex networks. The accumulation and propagation of damage in complex dynamical networks (that represent our organism) explains the major quantitative characteristics of the aging processes, including the exponential increase of mortality with age (the celebrated Gompertz law of mortality) and the accumulation of health deficits with age that ultimately results in increasing the risks of death.