Physiology of Aging

Aging is a process that all humans must go through, and as life expectancy increases it becomes more important to understand the intimate details to normal aging process. Maintaining health is very important to this process, the older a person becomes the more medical services is needed. Since aging is a process that begins when you are conceived and continues for as long as we live out life span, our body reflects genetic components and environmental experience. So in a genetic way our bodies has the capacity to adapt and repair as well as collect damages from disease process. In this society, we now think of 65 to 74 years old as “young old”, 75 to 84 as “middle old” and 84 plus, as “ old old”. With the our age advancing all of our body’s systems eventually reduce to a slow rate while everyone’s aging experience is different, there are some generalizations that can be seen in each of the body’s systems. Skin, the primary function of the skin is to protect the organism from the environment. But as we age our skin looses it is thickness by about 20 percent. The skin becomes thin and fragile and can no longer retain internal heat. For the Musculoskeletal, muscle mass is a primary source of metabolic heat. When muscles contract, heat will generate. The heat that the muscle puts out maintains body temperature, to require normal body function. Around the third decade of person’s life span, the muscle tissue reduces in size, elasticity and strength. As a result the body gets older and muscular activity becomes less takes more to complete a task. As for the respiratory function the lungs lose elastic recoil in the lung tissues. These changes can reduce the efficiency of gas exchange and lake hard to exercise. The cardiovascular function usually shows a slowdown in the autonomic nervous system, but is usually good enough to allow moderate physical activity, throughout their lives. As for the metabolism and Endocrine with old age comes the reduction in hormone