(or 2!) Dying of old age, can you actually DIE because of the body being worn out, or is it always a disease or such? I read that if we cure every disease, we would live hundreds of years.

Question

Title! I don’t get it. Isn’t my finger getting worn from just being used for too long? Or will it eventually get worse because of something else?

In: Biology

Answer 1

You could technically prolong life by 100s of years if you cured all diseases as a lot of the ways a body or more specifically, organs could fail from aging are often labeled as a disease. Therefore curing these diseases would likely require somehow rejuvenating the body closer to that of someone younger.

More practically when thr average person talks about a disease they mean someone getting sick with something like the cold or flu. Old people getting sick and having their weakened immune systems fail is common way for old people to die. Curing all of these disease would likely see an increase in people’s life span of maybe a decade or two on average, but these added years would also likely see the person becoming significantly reduced physically and mentally with relatively low quality of life as their bodies continue to break down when compared to the miracle of the first option.