Back

Slow Gompertzian aging in long-lived C. elegans results from expansion of decrepitude, not decelerated aging

Zhang, B.; Gems, D.

2025-04-18 physiology
10.1101/2025.04.13.648378 bioRxiv
Show abstract

The Gompertz equation describes exponential age-increases in animal mortality rate arising from biological aging. Its parameters, and {beta}, are widely used to evaluate lifespan-extending interventions and human mortality patterns: it is assumed that reduction in {beta} corresponds to deceleration of aging rate, and reduction in to reduced aging-independent mortality. However, this view has never been empirically validated. We therefore investigated the biological basis of and {beta}, by simultaneous quantification of mortality and age-related health in long-lived populations of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. We show that reduction in {beta} arises not from decelerated aging but expansion of decrepitude in longer-lived individuals, whereas reduction in arises from decelerated aging. This empirical re-evaluation of Gompertzian aging inverts and challenges long-standing ideas in the biodemography of aging.

Matching journals

The top 4 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.