02 Slowing the March of Time

AS WE GET OLDER, MORE INFLAMMATION DRIVES ACHES AND PAINS. BUT EXPERTS SAY IT DOESN’T HAVE TO, AND SOLUTIONS ARE ON THE WAY.

IT HAPPENS to everyone. With age come achy joints and a rising risk for cancer, heart disease, dementia, arthritis, and other illnesses. Those changes follow an uptick in inflammatory molecules over the course of a lifetime so common it has a scientific name: inflammaging. Now researchers are racing to unravel how the inflammatory process changes over our lifespan, what instigates the shift, and how it might be possible to interfere with it. As people age, increasing amounts of pro-inflammatory cytokines and other inflammation-related molecules circulate in the blood. When the shift occurs depends on the person, says Ron DePinho, a cancer biology and aging researcher at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. But 50 is generally when inflammation starts to increase, with a dramatic shift after 60. The uptick…

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National Geographic (Digital) - 1 Issue, August 2024

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