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32 - The developmental environment: implications for ageing and life span

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 August 2009

By
Thomas B. L. Kirkwood
Edited by
Peter Gluckman  and
Mark Hanson
Thomas B. L. Kirkwood
Affiliation:
University of Newcastle
Peter Gluckman
Affiliation:
University of Auckland
Mark Hanson
Affiliation:
University of Southampton
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Summary

Introduction

The ageing process is generally taken to refer to the final stages of an organism's life cycle, ‘ageing’ often being defined as a progressive, generalised impairment of function resulting in an increasing risk of frailty, disability, disease, and eventually death. Although ageing is thus distanced from the developmental processes of early life, a continuum of cellular and molecular processes connects the beginning and end of life, and recent advances in research on ageing have highlighted the life-course nature of the factors that influence ageing and longevity. In particular, it is now widely accepted that events occurring early in life can have important impacts on the outcomes of the ageing process, influencing both health in old age and the length of life itself.

Three principal kinds of mechanism can be distinguished that connect development with ageing. First, the ageing process is driven by the lifelong accumulation of cellular and molecular damage, arising from processes such as oxidative damage and errors in macromolecule synthesis and processing. These errors begin to accumulate from a very early stage of development, so stresses in early life that increase rates of damage, even transiently, can have long-term consequences. Second, as we shall see below, the cellular maintenance and repair processes that influence damage accumulation appear to be influenced in some circumstances by environmental factors, such as nutrition. Therefore, variations in the developmental environment can affect the efficiency of repair, which in turn can affect ageing and life span.

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Developmental Origins of Health and Disease , pp. 426 - 435
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

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