I’ve done some research, and according to those who know you die from disease and/or injury. Your body (cells) doesn’t just “wear out”.
But I’m left with the question: If I don’t die of either of those, what will eventually kill me? I realize we’re all doomed to eventually die of some mishap, but what if?
Peace,
mangeorge
It’s my understanding that every time a cell replicates it loses a tiny chunk of DNA at the end. This is not a problem in the short term - cells specifically have ‘junk’ DNA at the end (telomeres) that get chopped off so you don’t lose anything important.
However, in the long term, you will eventually run out of telomeres and the cells either stop replicating, replicate with errors and die, or replicate with errors and turn into cancer. So eventually, you will die of either cancer or your body not replenishing it’s cells enough to keep you going.
Anyway I’m not a doctor (or biologist, or geneticist or…) so this may only be partially correct or totally misleading. It’s just something I remember reading a while back.
Sounds plausible to me, but can you explain the vastly different ages people die of “old age” 70’s, 80’s, 90’s, 100s, 110, 120?
The official cause of death category ‘old age’ was last used in the US in 1951. So you could say that no one has died of old age since.
If you don’t die of injury (cause of death: trauma) your death WILL be assigned a cause, usually a disease. Often pneumonia. Some sort of cancer, or organ failure or something else. It may very well be that you are old and just worn out. But that is not an official cause.
That would be a mixture of Genes + Environment then. The telomeres aren’t quite a fixed length and there isn’t a "fixed’ number that’s always cut off each time. Some people have better DNA repair mechanisms than others and others don’t and end up with Cancer when they’re 60 vs. someone who may be able to put off having cancer until they’re 70-80 years old.
But in the end, it’ll catch up to you at some point, as NORMAL Human cells aren’t meant to be Immortal, Cancer cells are the ones who tend to go that route. Human cells do have a set shelf life and when they go- hopefully you’re still making more, otherwise, well, that’s when you get the signs of aging.
But again, environment plays a role as well- if you’ve exposed yourself to any risk factors that may help decay the DNA, or things like if you’ve taken care of your health or if you’ve gone to the doctor and gotten the checkups and those sorts of things. So it’s a mixture of factors and not any one thing that’s the “secret” to a long life, if you will.
Even if you don’t suffer from a fatal disease or accident, the older you get the more susceptible you are to cascading side effects. At some point, an otherwise innocuous event will trigger a series of inevitable “dominoes.”
And rule #1 is: Stay out of hospitals.
As far as I understand it, nobody in the entire history of our species has ever died of old age. For global cellular replicative senescence to occur (in other words, for every cell in the organism to reach the Hayflick limit) in a human, an age of 140 years would have to be achieved. No human has ever been verifiably documented to have lived to that age. When we die in advanced age, it is due ultimately to either cancer or failure of the cardiovascular system.
Or the medical examiner just makes something up, as he did in my father’s case. Due to the circumstances of my father’s death, an autopsy was required. His death certificate listed the cause of death as “complications of heart disease”, which I found to be rather vague. So I called the ME, and asked him if my father had suffered a heart attack, or any blockage of a cardiac artery. He said no, there had been no infarction, but he had heart disease. I pointed out that many people have heart disease, but when they die as a result of it, they have a heart attack caused by a blockage. Just what was the complication that caused his death? I never did get a satisfactory answer.
What do you mean “worn out”? I’ve noticed that I get holes in the skin on my arms easily. Is my skin wearing out? Is this the beginning of the end? Will I still have to clean house?
OK, forgive me, but there’s always inevitably some telomere reference in threads like this - every single time. This process was discovered a while back and quickly touted in the press as the be-all and end-all of aging. It’s not. It’s a factor involved in aging, but there are many many others. Telomere shortening is not the driving factor behind all age-related degeneration, and its importance tends to be highly exaggerated. Sorry. Pet peeve.
As to the OP, I just heard yesterday that in a study of centenarians with no obvious cause of death - i.e., “died of old age” - over 70% were found to have had serious cardiovascular disease. Your heart tends to be one of your parts that wears out the quickets.
Disease isn’t just something that you “catch”. Your body is in a constant battle against disease. As your body wears down, it becomes less and less able to overcome disease, something that wouldn’t have killed you in your 30’s kills you in your 80’s. There are also chronic, long acting diseases like heart disease, that just get worse and worse over time. Eventually you reach the tipping point where your body is no longer able to overcome the severity of the disease, either because the disease has gotten worse, or your body is just too worn down to survive it.
Sunday on 60 Minutes there was a feature story on Forrest Bird, inventor of the mechanical ventilator. The guy, born in 1921, still looks remarkably hale and hearty, is still flying his many planes, and seems happy with his lot in life.
That story was in the back of my mind when I wrote this OP.
But, I’m not sure how I’d feel about the man flying over my house. 
I’m the medical director at a VA nursing home, and I really wish I could put “old age” on death certificates. The typical story there is that a 90-year-old man with a dozen major medical conditions and a DNR order is found dead somewhat after the fact when the nurse does her rounds. There’s no good way to know which of those medical conditions finally did it, and we’re certainly not going to do an autopsy to find out.
You can hedge on a death certificate with “probable”, and if coronary disease is on the list I’ll usually call it “probable acute myocardial infarction”. They’ll also accept Alzheimer’s dementia as a primary cause of death even though it really isn’t; that’s because listing “dehydration” or “malnutrition” (which is usually the truly primary cause in advanced dementia) causes a whole pile of trouble for the nursing home even if it was an understood and accepted outcome.
Like Oliver Wendell Holmes’ wonderful one-hoss shay, I guess if you don’t break down somewhere you would indeed just wear out.
I think “died of old age”, as long as it’s true and as you describe and not a cover for something under-handed, has a kinda, I don’t know, honorable ring to it. It’s like the oldster simply didn’t wake up one day.
Gone are the days when this often happened in the family home.
My mother died (in a nursing home) at the age of 95. She had basically stopped eating several months before. (The medical staff at the nursing home all told me “that’s basically what they do when they decide they’re done. We could install a feeding tube but we don’t recommend it; let her have her dignity” and we agreed with that.) One day at lunch (which she didn’t touch) she got drowsy and fell asleep. When the staff went to wheel her back to her room they realized she was gone.
The official cause of death was declared to be “congenital heart failure”. Well, her heart ***did ***stop beating…
This reminds me of the Godfather satire I remember seeing:
Medical Examiner: He died of natural causes.
Person: Natural causes? He has 100s of bullet holes, a knife in his back, and his head is missing.
Medical Examiner: In New Jersey, those are natural causes.
Or, alternately, “When a person has a dagger through the heart, it’s only natural that they die”. The same joke was used in a Drizz’t novel.
I don’t think anyone invented that joke. It’s one of those naturals that pop up spontaneously.
Perhaps you mean congestive heart failure? Congenital means a birth defect – a defect in the developing fetus. It seems unlikely this caused her death 95 years later.