I will cite only the most important facts necessary for an adequate understanding of the Concept and will try not to overload the text with references to facts widely known to gerontologists and geriatricians. The modern possibilities of the Internet allow readers to quickly find the most recent works available in the open access and concerning any fact mentioned in the review.
There are no new facts concerning aging in this work. The Concept offers a new look at this disease, its etiology and pathogenesis. A patient has a chance to be healed if the pathogenic factor that caused his disease (etiology) and the sequence of events in the mechanism of the development of his disease (pathogenesis) are known.
Treatment of aging, like any other disease, blindly or by symptoms, without knowledge of the etiology and pathogenesis, is not only useless, but also harmful (pathogenic) occupation. Many modern authors have already called aging a disease, and not a process, as has been accepted since the second century AD. However, most of them are limited only by etiology and often scattered elements of pathogenesis, linking them to its terminal stages. We do not know anything about the early stages of the pathogenesis of aging. Most of the clearly formulated aging hypotheses are based on pathogenic factors causing chaos in the metabolism of cells and tissues: – on numerous toxic metabolites of the intestinal bacterial flora [1]; – on highly reactive metabolites – free radicals of oxygen and nitrogen, entering into chemical reactions with biological polymers [2] and on chemically active aldehyde – glucose, which modifies amino groups of proteins, with excessive consumption of sugars. The hypothesis of accumulation of mutations is also based on chaos [3].
All of the above hypotheses, in fact, are one-act (primitively simple) and are suitable for explaining only pathological, but in no way physiological aging. Chemical or physical (energy quanta: electrons, photons, alpha particles) impact of a set of pathogenic factors on a huge list of targets in the human body – enzymes, transmembrane carriers, structural proteins, nucleic acids and phospholipids should lead to an unimaginable variety of effects on everyone levels of the organization.