Aging and Autoimmune Diseases

Aging always take a toll on the human body, causing autoimmune diseases and other age-related diseases. To avoid this scenario, delay the aging process as much as possible.

Aging begins as early as from young adulthood (around age 20 to 40) to middle adulthood (around age 40 to 65), and continues to old age (beginning at the age of retirement, approximately at age 65). Aging occurs throughout most of lifespan. Such a process is an accumulation of changes, which may be subtle or even drastic, that progressively lead to disease, degeneration, and, ultimately, death. Aging is difficult to define, but you will know it when you see it or experience it yourself. In brief, aging is a steady decline in health, which is instrumental in shortening lifespan; and the aging process is the duration during which such changes occur.

Whether you like it or not, your biological clock is ticking, and this will happen to various systems in your body: 

• Your heart will pump less blood, and your arteries will become stiffer and less flexible, resulting in high blood pressure—a health problem that often increases with age.
• With less oxygen and nutrients from the heart, your lungs will become less efficient in distributing oxygen to different organs and membranes of your body. 
• Your brain size will gradually reduce by approximately 10 percent between the age of 30 and 70. Loss of short-term memory will become more acute. 
• Your bone mass will reduce, making it more brittle and fragile. Your body size will shrink as you lose your muscle mass.

Your biological clock is ticking, whether you are conscious of it or not. Your biological clock may increase its speed of ticking if your body has more free radicals.   

What are free radicals? Your body is composed of many different types of cells, made up of many different types of molecules. Free radicals are molecules that contain unpaired electrons. Since electrons have a very strong tendency to co-exist in a paired rather than an unpaired state, free radicals indiscriminately pick up electrons from other healthy molecules close by. This chemical reaction converts those otherwise “healthy” molecules into free radicals, and thus setting up a chain reaction that can cause substantial biological damage to cells.

Free radicals are highly reactive, damaging not only cells but also chemicals in your body, such as enzymes (for digestion), making them less effective.

Aging causes oxidation, which literally means “rusting.” Free radicals cause oxidative damage to cells and tissues. Free radicals do not make you younger and healthier for longer; quite the contrary, they age you prematurely and contribute to many different diseases, including autoimmune diseases, cancers and heart diseases, among others.

Free radicals occur naturally as byproducts of oxidation, such as during respiration and other chemical processes. For example, during breathing, life-giving oxygen is produced and harmful carbon dioxide is released; digestion is another oxidation process, and your body obtains its energy from food through oxidation, during which free radicals are generated in the form of waste buildup. Ironically, what gives life may also take away life.

Free radicals are normally present in your body in small numbers, without causing too much harm. However, over time, the accumulation of free radicals may cause irreparable damage to your cells and tissues, if such accumulation is unchecked.

In addition, free radicals can also be caused by external factors, including alcohol, chemicals and pesticides (from foods and pharmaceutical drugs), heavy metals, such as cadmium and lead (from the environment), radiation (from the sun and other sources), and tobacco smoke

In particular, heavy metals in your body can dramatically increase free radical chain reactions. The more toxic metals in your body, the higher is the free radical activity.

Antioxidants are powerful scavengers of free radicals in your body. They are substances in foods that disarm free radicals. Antioxidants include beta-carotene, and vitamins A, C, and E.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau