Oxidative damage – cause or effect?

Posted on 20. February 2009 by Vincent Giuliano

A reported study about free radicals is radical in its conclusions.  The study was based on disabling five genes in mutant Caenorhabditis elegans worms.  The study’s authors suggest that damage due to free radicals may not be a cause of aging but rather is a consequence of aging and suggest instead that the aging process may originate in the mitochondria.  See my discussion on the Mitochondrial DNA mutation theory of aging.  It would seriously upset the anti-aging establishment’s applecart if oxidative damage turned out to be only a symptom.  However, I hesitate to accept such a broad conclusion given the preponderance of evidence that exposure to strong oxidative stress, such as massive doses of radiation, generates the overt symptoms of aging.  Most likely we are dealing with a chicken-and-egg causative process here where it is both the case that oxidative damage contributes to aging and that aging contributes to oxidative damage.  And the mitochondria play an important role in mediating the aging process.  See the previous blog post as well.

About Vincent Giuliano

Being a follower, connoisseur, and interpreter of longevity research is my latest career. I have been at this part-time for well over a decade, and in 2007 this became my mainline activity. In earlier reincarnations of my career. I was founding dean of a graduate school and a university professor at the State University of New York, a senior consultant working in a variety of fields at Arthur D. Little, Inc., Chief Scientist and C00 of Mirror Systems, a software company, and an international Internet consultant. I got off the ground with one of the earliest PhD's from Harvard in a field later to become known as computer science. In various ways I contributed to the Computer Revolution starting in the 1950s and the Internet Revolution starting in the late 1980s. I am now engaged in doing the same for The Longevity Revolution. I have published something like 200 books and papers as well as over 350 blog entries and have enjoyed various periods of notoriety. If you do a Google search on Vincent E. Giuliano, most if not all of the entries on the first few pages that come up will be ones relating to me. I have a general writings site at www.vincegiuliano.com and an extensive site of my art at www.giulianoart.com.
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