The Clore Center for Biological Physics
A Langevin model for human aging and longevity
LUNCH AT 12:45
Aging is characterized by several quantitative regularities: mortality and disease incidence rise exponentially with age, organ function declines linearly, and species with very different lifespans exhibit similarly shaped survival curves. I will present recent developments that unify these quantitative phenomena within the framework of the Saturating Removal (SR) model. The SR model is a biologically motivated stochastic differential equation that describes aging as a damage accumulation process with linearly increasing production with time and saturating removal, with death and disease modeled as first-passage-time processes.
I will discuss the statistical properties of the model, including how the exponential mortality increase emerges from a Kramers escape rate over a barrier. I will then present recent results showing how the model organizes aging across species into two distinct aging regimes- ballistic and quasi steady state. Comparing the model to human data, indicates that late-life survival and the extreme-value tail of exceptionally long-lived individuals constrain damage production and removal parameters in human populations. This model can help prioritize longevity interventions. I will discuss future directions and open questions.
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