What\u2019s more depressing than the thought of a long, slow decline in health? The thought of several short, sharp declines. Thank you, science!<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t believe ageing is linear: I reckon we have long plateaux, then everything falls apart all at once. I realised this at the close of my harrowing 31st year, when I looked in the mirror and didn\u2019t recognise the sad, grey ghost staring back. I swear one day I was young and moderately dewy with a functioning musculoskeletal system; the next my face imploded, shortly followed by my knee (yes, it was a fun year). There\u2019s a phrase for this kind of sudden ageing in French: prendre un coup de vieux<\/em>, which feels appropriate, since I was living in France during that first precipitous decline and prolonged exposure to the angry rigours of Parisian life was at least partly to blame.<\/p>\n Anyway, now science is catching up. Earlier this year, researchers identified two \u201cpeaks\u201d<\/a> for ageing at 44 and 60, and now a new paper<\/a> points to three peaks in brain ageing. At 58, there are changes in proteins associated with wound healing, metabolism and mental health; at 70, it\u2019s age-related brain conditions; and when we hit 78, immunity and inflammation-associated proteins are affected.<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What\u2019s more depressing than the thought of a long, slow decline in health? The thought of several short, sharp declines. Thank you, science! I don\u2019t believe ageing is linear: I reckon we have long plateaux, then everything falls apart all at once. I realised this at the close of my harrowing 31st year, when I … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28963"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28963\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}