© MICHAEL SLOAN/THEISPOT
What is the greatest menace associated with age-related diseases? Hypertension? Obesity? High cholesterol? No. It’s simply the number of years an individual lives.
For example, elevated plasma cholesterol is considered a major risk factor for cardiovascular-disease death. Yet, when compared with aging itself, the risk of high cholesterol alone pales. For a typical adult, high cholesterol poses a threefold increase in the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease. Simply aging from 35 to 85, however, increases that risk about a thousand fold.
Similar patterns are observed for cancer, type 2 diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease. National Institutes of Health data indicate that the risk of dying from these diseases accelerates logarithmically by approximately 100 to 1,000-fold between ages 35 and 85. No wonder so many elderly ...
