• Question: Why do some illnesses limit/affect the age some people can live to?

    Asked by Daisie21 to Carolyn, Peter, Richard, Sara, Siana on 16 Nov 2015.
    • Photo: Richard Unwin

      Richard Unwin answered on 16 Nov 2015:

      Hello again Daisie,

      This is a tough question as it depends on the illness. In general though, the illness affects how a certain part of the body is working – whether that’s a disease of ageing like heart disease or dementia, or a life-threatening infection such as meningitis. Life is limited by how long the organ works for with that damaging condition before it ‘fails’ and, if it’s a vital organ, you die as a result of that disease.

    • Photo: Carolyn Nielsen

      Carolyn Nielsen answered on 16 Nov 2015:

      Good question, Daisie21.

      An example of what Richard is talking about would be lung disease. If you are a smoker (hope not!), you will do a huge amount of damage to your lungs and likely get lung cancer or other lung diseases. Lungs are obviously essential, so developing these kind of diseases shortens how long they will work properly for.

      There are other examples of infections though where we don’t really understand what is going on. The virus I study- cytomegalovirus- is associated with ‘all-cause mortality’, which is a fancy way of saying shortened lifespan. We don’t know exactly why this is, which is why people are doing more research in this area.

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