Dying of old age

In all of the years that you have lived until now have you ever heard someone saying that this person died of old age. Why is that if an old person passes away we just assume that oh they must have died of old age. There is no such thing of dying of an old age and you will never see it written on someone's death certificate.

As we age, our bodies Accumulate damage as our medical Problems increases. Dying of old age is just a saying us people use when we fail to understand the reason of an aged person dying. When the cause of their demise is not understood or not obvious.

As we age, the probability of people suffering from a range of medical diseases increases as the body can no longer repair it's own cells properly and the immune system gets weaker and weaker and the body accumulates more damage, which results in health problems such as high and low blood pressure, heart attack or Alzheimer's disease and these diseases can possibly lead to death. For example the Alzheimer's disease is associated with difficulty in chewing or swallowing or loosing the ability to carry on a conversation and respond to their environment which can cause complications and lead to passing away of a person.

So why is it that the phrase dying of old age has come to light. Doctors won't always know the exact reason of an elderly person passing away because they may have a number of complications in their body that interact in different ways making it difficult to find the exact cause, As Dr Rosenfeld says.

Doctors are less likely to carry out hundreds of testing that might help to find the cause in an elderly person compared to a young healthy patient.

"In many cases, the death certificate will only say what is the most likely cause of death without necessarily having a specific or post-mortem proven cause of death," Dr Rosenfeld says.

"Every death certificate, even when they don't know what it was, they would usually say heart attack, cardiac arrest. If it's an old person in a nursing home they probably usually say pneumonia."

If you think about it, nowadays people who are 60 or 70 years old look 26 or 30 years old which is astonishing. 

It's everyone's dream or wish to look young and beautiful no matter what age they are. So is there a way we can stop ageing? Researchers all over the world are trying hard to figure out ways to stop the ageing process. One particular area they focus on are drugs that can kill the cells that have reached the point where they stop dividing.

Dr Wu says if it is shown that metformin works to maintain human health into old age, the "cheap as chips" drug will lead to huge savings in the health system.

"It's a very ambitious study, but if it works it'll be a huge public health saving."