Abstract
Aging causes a range of physiological changes in the body. Some of them are well known; some of them were recently discovered. For instance, nerve conduction velocity decreases with age (Munsat 1984), hearing is impaired (Mader 1984), and the forced expiratory volume is reduced (Tobin 1981). The interaction between different factors is still insufficiently understood. It is generally agreed that decreased function of different systems is not crucial. Instead of that it is the interplay between the components that causes significant function loss. Function level is often preserved in normal situations, but adaptation to stress – in systems theory termed perturbation – is strongly reduced. There are some subsystems, however, for which variability increases with age (Vaillancourt and Newell 2002). General mortality in a (Western) population is caused mainly by cardiovascular diseases (around 40 %) and cancer (around 25 %), followed by far more seldom diseases like respiratory syndromes, gastroenterological syndromes (all under 10 and 5 %, respectively) (Gaber 2011).
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Ernst, G. (2014). General Mortality. In: Heart Rate Variability. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-4309-3_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-4309-3_7
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