I ran across this while waiting for life support to kick in this morning. It is about as understandable as these things get.


1. Interdiscip Top Gerontol. 2007;35:83-97.

Anti-inflammatory mechanisms of dietary restriction in slowing aging processes.

Morgan TE, Wong AM, Finch CE.

Leonard Davis School of Gerontology and USC College, University of Southern
California, 3715 McClintock Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA. temorgan@usc.edu

Dietary restriction (DR) remains the most powerful and general environmental
manipulation of aging processes in laboratory animals with strong beneficial
effects on most age-related degenerative changes throughout the body. Underlying
the beneficial effects of DR is the attenuation of system-wide inflammatory
processes including those occurring within the central nervous system. During
normal aging a progressive neuroinflammatory state builds in the brain involving
astrocytes and microglia, the primary cellular components of neuroinflammation.
DR attenuates the age-related activation of astrocytes and microglia with
concomitant beneficial effects on neurodegeneration and cognition. Increasing
evidence suggests that common pathways are emerging that link many normal aging
inflammatory processes with age-related diseases such as Alzheimer, cancer,
diabetes and cardiovascular disease.


PMID: 17063034 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

....So as "normal aging" (or what passes for it in our mad, mad modern world) comes at us, a certain number fall to neuroinflammation as they pass middle age. Those are Senior Onset. Then there are some who, at any of a number of points in their lives, develop a similar neuroinflammation and get a headstart - Young Onset. And, because stress makes inflammation worse, that headstart has a double cost as time goes by. Most of us find ourselves out in the middle.

Now, who's up for biscuits and gravy?