Thus, senile changes, which we judge about aging, are manifested primarily at the level of structural (morphological and anatomical) changes: – changes in the skeleton; changes in the connective tissue basis of organs; – an increase in the number of elements of extracellular connective tissue and its subsequent ossification. Ultimately, all slowly metabolized waste of cell life first enters the extracellular fluid and then into the blood before being excreted in the urine.
Structural pathological changes in cells, tissues and organs act as secondary pathogenic factors, entailing malfunctions of functional elements.
The second category of free energy expenditures includes the costs of operating security systems and overcoming metabolic chaos in the form of diseases, which I wrote about above. The more energy is spent on the operation of security systems and on overcoming metabolic chaos, the less it remains for vital functions and the lower the average life expectancy. One of the results of metabolic chaos, manifested in the form of inflammation that accompanies many diseases, is an increase in body temperature, indicating a decrease in the efficiency of bioenergetic mechanisms.
Spending funds (energy) on conditioning the environment, that is, removing from habitat pathogenic microorganisms, toxic substances and reducing the levels of negative physical (radiation) and mental influences, humanity thereby provides the economy of free energy by organisms, which they spend on combating various pathogenic factors and metabolic chaos, thereby reducing the rate of pathological aging and increasing life expectancy.
The sharp increase in the average life expectancy in the twentieth century was provided by the work of infectious disease specialists, hygienists, parasitologists and epidemiologists, who defeated most of the infections. In the second half of the twentieth century, ecologists, clinical epidemiologists, toxicologists and technologists did it, overcoming the negative consequences of the first technical revolutions associated with chemical and physical pollution of the environment.
Hypoxia, reducing the activity of the main source of free energy – the mitochondrial system of oxidative phosphorylation, leads to a decrease in both phosphate and redox potential of cells. The unique property of hypoxia as the main pathogenic factor causing aging is the presence of numerous enhancers of its action. First, a decrease in oxygen concentration leads to a decrease in the rate of free energy production in the cell, the main mass carriers of which are ATP, NADH, NADPH and gradients of hydrogen, sodium, potassium and chlorine ions on cell membranes.