General system theory of aging
Special role of the immune system
V. I. Dontsov
© V. I. Dontsov, 2019
ISBN 978-5-0050-1571-6
Created with Ridero smart publishing system
V.I. Dontsov. General system theory of aging. Special role of the immune system. 2019. – 320 p. Electronic edition. Figures – 57. Schemes – 4. Tables – 4. Formulas – 9.
Translation from Russian by the service of Springer Edit.
The monograph examines the general methodological problems of the aging of biological systems, debunking myths and cliches circulating in this area; modeling of the general aging process, highlighting the causes of aging, the main mechanisms, and their biological content, as well as consideration of the fundamental possibilities and directions of influence on this process.
A special place is occupied by the use of system analysis and consideration of integrative systems that combine hierarchically complex systems into a single whole, and the special role of the immune system, namely, that part of it, which is not responsible for immune phenomena proper, but regulates the interaction of various cell populations in the body. A single look at aging allows you to determine the possibilities and directions of influence on this process, and the allocation of aging syndromes, similar to those in common diseases, allows you to influence aging with conventional therapeutic agents.
The book is intended for specialists in the field of general biology and medicine, system analysis, for gerontologists and specialists in anti-age medicine and biology of aging, as well as for graduate students, teachers, and students of higher educational institutions, theorists and experimental studies.
Introduction
According to WHO, the level of health and life expectancy of the population are among the central indicators of the level and quality of life in the country. However, the increase in life expectancy, which is universally observed in all civilized countries, poses a serious problem associated with a simultaneous decrease in the birth rate, this is a worldwide trend of aging of the population. The problem of aging is occupied by the most diverse areas of theoretical science and their practical sections. General biology considers the emergence and evolution of ontogenesis, the species life span, the ecology of species and the Earth’s overall ecosystem.
Demography develops population gerontology, especially the aging of various population groups and the change in mortality in different historical epochs. Molecular biology, genetics, physiology, biochemistry, and histology have thoroughly studied all the features of the manifestation of aging at the level of molecules, genes, cells, tissues and organs, as well as changes in the systemic relationships of organs and tissues in the whole organism throughout life. Geriatrics studies in detail the course and treatment of diseases in the elderly.
However, it is philosophy, its methodological section – gnoseology, and the modern methodological scientific principle – system analysis that plays a leading role in questions about the essence of life and death, constant movement and self-renewal, and also in methodological questions about the essence and cause of the aging phenomenon and the fundamental possibility of overcoming it, about the future of man as a race with global interventions in the biological nature of man and in other generally significant, human-common problems.
Knowledge of philosophy and methodology eliminates the typical flaws characteristic of modern representatives of highly specialized science, first of all, of replacing the essence of aging with its mechanisms, which led to the unrestrained reproduction of the “theories” of aging.
Practical success is always based on new scientific knowledge and theoretical work, which is especially important for the science of aging. In recent years, quite a lot of fundamental work has appeared on molecular, genetic, cellular manifestations of aging, and ideas about the role of apoptosis, telomerase and other relatively new scientific data on cellular processes in aging processes are being exaggerated. At the same time, no clear idea of aging as a single process affecting the whole organism is formed. It is not clear how important the studied mechanisms of aging are for the aging of the whole organism, how they interact with each other and how important they are.
In this monograph, using the system analysis methodology, to consider the aging process as a whole as a phenomenon typical of all living things, as well as to highlight the most important aging processes and mechanisms for mammals and humans first of all.
We also present a new look at the main mechanisms of aging associated with the development of regulatory models of aging and specifying their manifestation – through the immune mechanisms, and the immune mechanisms here act in a specific form – as regulators of the proliferative activity of somatic cells, which is pronounced decreases with age, defining age-related atrophy of tissues – this is a new trend in immunobiology, in which domestic scientists are ahead in the world.
The monograph makes it possible in general to create a general idea of aging, its causes and main mechanisms, and to evaluate the possibilities and ways of influencing, having a clear idea about the points of application and the possible effectiveness of effects, which is always the main complexity of modern theories and practical impacts on aging.
Main Points
The presence of hundreds of theories of aging to date indicates not only and not so much the lack of a unified theory, general views, or lack of knowledge of the causes and essence of aging, but often a methodological lack of subject matter understanding.
The development of a systems approach – a new, whole world view, brought science out of a methodological crisis, while not discarding what has been achieved.
The general cause of aging can be expressed only in the language of high-level abstraction as an objective pattern of life, being, as a principle, but not as specific mechanism in the organism. The reduction of principles to mechanisms is the main methodological error in the sciences, including in gerontology.
System analysis reflects not the material structure of the object that morphological sciences study, but a hierarchy of essential principles reflecting the laws of functioning and communication within and between the structural levels of the object being considered, which acts as a complex hierarchical dynamic system.
The common cause of aging is known as part of ontogenesis, part of life itself, as a phenomenon of disruptions in the structure and function of the system accumulating with age, as movements from order to chaos. In general, it is a natural process in nature, since it proceeds with an increasein entropy – the accumulation of chaos in a systems.
Aging has been known since antiquity – as a reduction in vitality with age. The current general definition of aging as a reduction in overall vitality with age.
The first mathematical model of aging was created almost 200 years ago by B. Gompertz (1825) and still most accurately describes the age dynamics of human mortality and, apparently, of most other organisms. Mortality, as quantitative characterization of the inability to resist destruction, can be viewed as the reciprocal of vitality.
A simple assumption about the stochasticity of the aging process is enough: the viability over time decreases in proportion to itself at each time point in order to obtain the basic law of aging: mortality increases with age by the exponent. Such a nonspecific increase in the body’s vulnerability to all influences with age is called aging itself:
d X / d t = – k X, k is a coefficient, X is viability, t is time.
Considering the mortality (μ) as an inverse viability value (μ = 1 / X), the basic aging formula is obtained (B. Gompertz and W. Makekem):
μ