One of the keys to understanding and augmenting healthy ageing is to understand stress-responsive signalling and how it is modulated with age. Normal ageing results from the imbalance between cellular damage, accrued throughout life, and the progressive decline in stress response and repair pathways.
These pathways respond to changes in nutrient or energy status and oxidative damage (to DNA, protein or lipids) and transmit signals to activate adaptive cellular responses, including:
These adaptive responses are controlled by intracellular signalling pathways, which act to maintain cellular and organismal homeostasis in the face of changes in nutrient availability, oxidative stress, protein misfolding and DNA damage.