People always ask “are there multiple causes of aging?”. Surely there are. If not, we would only die of one cause as we get older. We would all get cancer or something. There would be something like 90% of deaths from The Single Cause of Death and the remaining 10% from pick your choice of: getting run over from a bus, suicide, car accidents, etc.
But of course there are multiple causes of aging-related deaths: cancer, a host of cardiovascular ailments and dementia, all of which get exponentially worse as we age. I always remembered the factoid that we are 1,000x more likely to die from cancer at 65 than 35 (trying to find a citation for this). But have a look for yourself at the following image (it’s not 1000x but is exponentially higher).
Yes, the incidence rate of cancer does grow exponentially. So aging causes cancer. Or a process of aging causes cancer.
So, yes, there are multiple causes. With any complex system there are going to be different ways to break/fail. Think about all the ways cars wear out and break down. And humans are infinitely way more complex than cars. We are just touching the surface of how complex we are. We don’t even really know what memories are.
To put just how complex we are in perspective, have a look at, I don’t know, 1/30th of the image found at this link in the below image. The quality is low but not like you’re actually going to read that stuff or know what it means anyways. The original image is so big that including it on this web page is infeasible. This image is just metabolic pathways. Not to mention other kinds of pathways. And remember, the image below is a small fraction of all human metabolic pathways.
So, going back to comparing the aging of cars to humans. How many things just wear out in cars over time? But we can replace many things in cars. Humans only have that option with a few things, and the supply of organs is limited.
One irony of this car analogy I am making is that rust is mentioned as a common cause of car “death” at this Quora answer.
Really the only things that will kill a car are rust and accident damage that affect the structural integrity of the chassis
What is rust? It’s just oxygen, hydrogen and iron. And what are we? We’re oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen. Rust is oxidation. And what do we try and eat lots of: anti-oxidants. Why though? No idea but I will look it up and write a post about it.
Is oxygen just destroying everything around us, including ourselves? That precious lifeblood, oxygen, we all rely on? That would be crazy if the process is the same or similar. Are wrinkles oxidation? We don’t know what wrinkling is actually [citation needed; another post topic].
Ok, back to “are there multiple causes of aging?”. Almost surely. If one thing doesn’t kill you, another will. If you make it past 80, your chances of cancer decline. But then you’ll get dementia like both of my grandmothers. Stuff builds up in your brain, that is slowed down by increasing blood flow to the brain by “taking” saunas, or at least that is one theory. You’ll develop Type II diabetes like my grandfather if cancer doesn’t run in your family.
So yes, of course there are multiple causes of aging.