The paths of life: How do you want to grow old?
As you can imagine, each person ages differently, following an individual trajectory. However, due to genetic, environmental, cultural, dietary, and other factors shared among members of the same population, it can be said that each population also has its own aging trajectory; this is called normative aging .
Therefore, both as a population and as individuals, we can age following three trajectories (Figure 1):
1- Normative aging : the gradual loss of functional abilities over the years that follows the population where I live.
2- Accelerated aging : Exposure to toxic agents, stressors, food, environment, habits, among other risk factors that anticipate the loss of functional capacity and the emergence of diseases.
3- Healthy aging : exposure to a series of factors that postpone aging, preserving functional capacity over the years.
Figure 1. Life trajectories