My stepfather’s father past away at the age of 88 last week. It was very sad but surprisingly enough, he was in very good health. He had to move into a nursing home a week before, not because he was ill, but because his wife was very sick and needed constant nursing. My mother claims that he willed himself to die because he couldn’t stand the thought of being locked in a single room with his wife bitching and nagging 24/7. The doctor said the cause of death was heart failure, which means to me that he died because he stopped breathing and his heart did not beat anymore. Duh!
I have heard a similar situation happen with several other supposedly healthy, elderly people. My question is:
a) Can the elderly will themselves to die consciously or unconsciously?
b) Is there any such thing as dying of old age (i.e. the body just wearing out and getting too tired to go on anymore)?
If you live long enough, eventually something will give out - heart, a weak spot in a blood vessel causing anuerysm, etc. - so technically, that would be death as a result of old age. The death certificate would have something specific as a cause of death, but if you die in your sleep at 98, it’s just old age.
My father always said that he would never want to have a stroke. Seeing the way people he knew were so dibilitated by suffering strokes only reinforced it with him. In February of this year he had a stroke - he was 83. The funny thing about a major stroke is that you don’t necessarily know you’ve had one. My father wasn’t looking too good, but he had hope and a strong desire to go home. When he was told, and made to understand, that he had a stroke (thanks, Doc, we were trying not to tell him), he just went downhill from there. Started talking (or slurring, actually) about seeing his parents, etc. He died a week later. So yes, I suppose you can will yourself to die, just as you can will yourself to live. The mind is a powerful thing.
My family is absolutely convinced that my grandfather willed himself to die! His wife (my step-grandmother) died, his 2 youngest daughters married and moved away, and the building he lived in for 35 years was being torn down so the company next to it could expand. This all happened within a years time. He bought a small condo and lived there…alone. He told everyone how bored he was, and how useless his life was now. A few months later he was dead of “natural causes”. Bull. He willed himself to die.
Had he come out of retirement and gotten a job he would have had something to live for and would still be alive.
This I believe 100%!
I’m not sure about willing oneself to die, but people certainly can will themselves to live. There is solid statistical evidence that people who are critically ill can will themselves to live just long enough to reach a major milestone–a birthday, anniversary, the new year, etc. Shortly after these milestones, death rates increase.
Isn’t there something about a limit to the number of replications that DNA can go through (erosion of the telomeres or something like that) which can set a limit on how old a human can get?
** mavpace ** My mom’s death certificate read “heart failure” as well. She was 64. I think that’s what they list when there’s no other obvious reason (no wound, no cancer, no doctor in attendance). In her case, the secondary causes were, I think, really the primary (heart gave out 'cause of the fatty globuales clogging up her bloodstream and liver failure etc brought on by acute alcoholism).
Telomeres do get shortened over time, preventing eventually a cell from dividing. Whether that can set a limit on age, however, is another question.
When a person dies of “heart failure,” the person dies from congestive heart failure, which is a medically determinable disorder and something the person had for a while before dying. The heart is not able to pump enough blood into the system, gets enlarged, and lymph is not removed efficiently from the circulation, causing edema in the legs and also causing cor pulmonale.
Think of heart failure as “pump failure”, which is how it is termed in many American medical texts. Because the heart is a double-barrelled pump, it logically follows that the volume pumped by the right side must be matched by the left. When there is a mismatch in output, it is termed “cardiac failure”.
One of the consequences barbitu8 alluded to is when blood congests the pulmonary circulation, causing oedema of the respiratory membranes. This leads to reduced gas exchange and bronchospasm (asthma), which. if left untreated, may rapidly become fatal. Pulmonary oedema usually manifests itself overnight, when people become horizontal in bed. Fluid that normally pools in the lower extremities during the day as ankle oedema, re-enters circulation and swells blood volume. If the left side of the heart is a bit weak, blood will bank up in pulmonary circulation, causing oedema.
Of course there are many other consequences of heart failure, and several different ways it can develop. Most of the time it can be managed successfully with medication, to the extent that people can look quite healthy. However, many of the cardiac drugs maintain homeostasis by compromising the the flight or fight response of the cardiovascular system.
Regarding the aging of the telomeres (in the DNA)> Why is the clock “reset” when the egg is fertilized by a sperm cell? Why can’t the body be reborn?
Why do we HAVE to die anyway?
In regards to egg cells: the “stem” cells, i.e., the ones that create egg cells, only do one mitosis (complete replication), then each of those 2 do a meiosis (split the chromosomes pairs evenly) in an individuals lifetime. Therefore, each stem cell ends up making 4 eggs. (I think sperm production is different somehow.)
So the DNA that makes a new baby is relatively new. Then in the fetus’ development, enough telomeres are added to make up for any lost during the stem cell splits that formed the egg cell.
1 According to Charles Pannati’s Extraordinary Endings Of Practically Everything And Everybody, a human being who had suffered no damage due to great injury or illness would wear out around 112. I would be more specific but I loaned my copy to friend.
2 As far as willing the body to die, I’m surprised no one has brought up Mark Twain. He was born in a year when Halley’s comet was visible. He was determined to die on its next visit. Twain even said that he would be disappointed to survive past that point. The day after the comet’s closest approach to earth Twain expired.
3 As for why we have to die, read some Kurt Vonnegut. In a world of immortals, there would be massive overpopulation. Vonnegut world of “anti-girasol” is considerably more depressing than our world.
So the DNA is NOT the ultimate “blueprint” of human life! There is obviously something BEYOND DNA, which instructs the “revivication” of the egg/sperm DNA.
The question is, what tells the body to STOP repairing the DNA?
If we could understand this process, maybe we could halt the aging process indefinitely!
All of this talk about congestive heart failure is beside the point. The OP was talking about otherwise healthy elderly folk.
My $.02–
“otherwise healthy” people really aren’t. For example, they have a big old aneurysm waiting to pop or arterial fatty deposits that the doctor just hasn’t found yet.
They heart started fibrillating and they had a heart attack and died. Not all that uncommon for people of any age. Most people don’t really die from their heart stopping, but from it beating out of rhythm (a “bag of worms” my Pediatrician father likes to call it)–something that can have any number of causes.
They’re working on this, slowly, egkelly. I suspect that within my lifetime (I’m 22) we’ll have some way of slowing aging. I doubt that will last me long enough to get to the point where we’ll be able to stop aging, but then science is a wonderful thing
As to there being something “beyond” DNA… no, there isn’t. There is a gene which produces a protein called telomerase, which is active in embryonic development IIRC. Activating this gene in a controlled manner might start to slow the aging process; unfortunately, activating it in an uncontrolled manner results in cancer (the gene and protein were originally discovered in cancer, as well as in bacteria). So until we learn to control it, we can’t do anything with it. But it’s still part of our DNA.
My answer to the OP - I think people can but most people don’t will themselves to die. I think alot of people when they reach an old age give up the desire to live. They become either content or tired with life. When they give up the desire to live small things can put them over the edge.
Another point!
Extending life beyond nature is a dangerous proposition. Nature sets limits for a reason, to help the species. We extend out life much more than we already have we come into major problems with over crowding. That is already the case in some places.
I don’t mean to be incompassionate but people die. That is the way life is. Deal with it. It makes life interesting. Life is short make the best out of it. That is a saying that I try to life to my best capabilities. If life was long I would just sit around and do nothing.
No, although that’s what you would think. It is in fact a combination of the dna of the zygote and the dna of the mother’s body which both contribute to further growth of the cell. Neither the sperm nor the egg are dead in any way, so ‘revivification’ is not necessary.
Think of the relationship between computer hardware and software. Imagine that we had computers designing all of our computers. And writing all the software. The software is the dna, information not yet expressed. It is rather meaningless until put into a machine that can compile that software, so that the hardware is almost a scaffolding propping the information into useful configurations.
In the same way, the mother’s body acts as the system inside which the dna of the zygote can structure and replicate itself. Her dna has coded her body to be the matrix for the zygote. That entails expressing proteins necessary for embryonic development, providing means to nourish the cells, etc. And as the zygote matures into an embryo and then a fetus, it also starts producing proteins and sending hormonal signals to the mother (all encoded in its DNA).
So, you see, it really is all about the dna.
Now if only we could really get computers to get it on boinky boinky style…
Technically, the only thing limiting the human lifespan(besides fatal trauma) are the telomeres. The number of cellular divisions a cell is allowed to make. One of the most visible effects of aging is skin sagging. Why does the skin sag? Because the number of healthy cells holding it together has diminished. Cells who run out of telomere become bloated and useless. There is an enzyme that can refill the telomere “hourglass”. It’s been called telomerase by their discoverers, scientists working for the Geron Corp. (www.geron.com). Theoretically, telomerase could allow a human being to live forever, with it’s 20 year old looks. Of course, the technic hasn’t been perfected yet(and far from it, there are enormous problems to overcome), but to choose when to die and to stay “eternally” young looking is nice to imagine, now that we have the scientific basic knowledge to do so…
