[The issue of feasibility of a general theory of aging I. Generalized Gompertz-Makeham Law].
Aging and longevity are interrelated so intimately that they should be treated with a unified theory. The longevity of every single cohort of living beings is determined by the rate of their dying-out. In most cases, mortality rates increase in accelerated fashions to reach values making the bulk of each finite cohort completely exhausted within a relatively narrow time interval shifted to the end of its resulting lifespan. Among simple functions with biologically interpretable parameters, the best fit to this pattern is demonstrated by the Gompertz-Makeham Law (GML): mu = C + lambda x e(gamma x t). A generalized form of GML mu = C(t) + lambda x e(-E(t)) is suggested and interpreted as a law of the dependency of mortality upon vitality rather than on age. It is reduced to the conventional GML when E depends linearly on t, that the age is an observable correlate of unobservable vitality. C(t) captures the inherently irresistible causes of death. The generalized GML can accommodate any mode of age-dependent functional decline, which should be placed into the exponent index to be translated into changes in mortality rate, and is compatible with any sort of cohort heterogeneity, which may be captured by substituting of GML parameters with relevant distributions or by combining of several generalized GML models. The generalized GML is suggested to result from the origin of life from the chemical world, which was associated with the transition of the role of the main variable in the Arrhenius equation k = A x exp[-Ea/(R x T)] for the dependency of chemical disintegration on temperature from T to Ea upon the transition from molecular to multimolecular prebiotic entities. Thus, the generalized GML is not a result of biological evolution but is a sort of chemical legacy of biology, which makes an important condition for life to evolve.
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D000375:Aging / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008136:Longevity / Q000502:physiology*; D008954:Models, Biological; D010684:Philosophy