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A Systems Level Explanation for Gompertzian Mortality Patterns is provided by the "Multiple and Inter-dependent Component Cause Model"

Nielsen, P. Y.; Jensen, M. K.; Mitarai, N.; Bhatt, S.

2023-06-22 systems biology
10.1101/2023.06.20.545709 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Understanding and facilitating healthy aging has become a major goal in medical research and it is becoming increasingly acknowledged that there is a need for understanding the aging phenotype as a whole rather than focusing on individual factors. Here, we provide a universal explanation for the emergence of Gompertzian mortality patterns using a systems approach to describe aging in complex organisms that consist of many inter-dependent subsystems. Our model relates to the Sufficient-Component Cause Model, widely used within the field of epidemiology, and we show that including inter-dependencies between subsystems and modeling the temporal evolution of subsystem failure results in Gompertizan mortality on the population level. Our model also provides temporal trajectories of mortality-risk for the individual. These results may give insight into understanding how biological age evolves stochastically within the individual, and how this in turn leads to a natural heterogeneity of biological age in a population.

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