Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease is not an Age-Related Condition
There are many ways in which you can sabotage your future health, but putting on weight and smoking are the most popular choices. They even have similar harmful effects on life expectancy: a decade or more of life lost. At the level of cells and tissue structures the effects of smoking look a lot like accelerated aging in some ways - which should not be surprising if we consider aging as nothing more than accumulated damage to the biological machinery of the body. This is a theme taken up in the paper quoted here:
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a disease that usually presents clinically at an advanced age, after years of smoking cigarettes. It is usually believed that aging and its biological consequences are important mechanisms in the disease pathogenesis. This concept has maintained the focus of studies on COPD in old-age individuals.Here we analyze the possible role of aging from a different point of view and introduce different concepts that might be considered useful additions to the understanding of the disease. Essentially, we propose and show evidence that COPD is a disease of the young susceptible smoker that progresses over time and manifests in older age because we live longer and not so much because of the effect of aging itself; we examine the concept of cell senescence, the basis of tissue aging, and how stressors like the ones produced by smoking can accelerate cell senescence with all of its untoward consequences in COPD. We thus finally suggest that COPD might accelerate aging rather than be a consequence of it.
In conclusion, we suggest that COPD could be considered a disease of the predisposed young individual that manifests clinically in old age because we live longer, with all of its consequences.
Spock just died of this. Senescence therapies didn't get here fast enough to save him.