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A Triple Mystery of Insidious Organ Failure: Are the Lung, Kidney and Brain All Damaged by the Ageing Pulse?

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posted on 2025-05-09, 04:31 authored by Jonathan Stone, Stephen R. Robinson, John Mitrofanis, Daniel JohnstoneDaniel Johnstone
This review explores the hypothesis that dementia in several forms, chronic kidney disease and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis have a common cause in pulse-induced capillary haemorrhage. All three conditions are age-related and characterised by insidious onset, uncertainty about their cause, exacerbation by hypertension, resistance to treatment and the relentlessness of their progression. We argue that the three conditions are the clinical outcomes of damage caused by pulse-induced haemorrhage from capillaries. The damage, first detectable in mid-life, creates first mild and then severe symptoms of cognitive, renal and pulmonary dysfunction. We also review evidence that in all three organs there has developed, by young adulthood, a reserve of tissue that enables them to function well, despite the ‘heartbeat by heartbeat’ damage that accumulates from early mid-life; and that it is when that reserve is exhausted, typically in late age, that symptoms of organ failure emerge and progress. If this common cause can be established, a step will have been taken towards the understanding, treatment and delay of three conditions that have their beginnings in every individual and that, in those who survive other causes of death, become lethal in late age.

History

Journal title

Biomedicines

Volume

12

Issue

9

Article number

1969

Publisher

MDPI AG

Language

  • en, English

College/Research Centre

College of Health, Medicine and Wellbeing

School

School of Biomedical Sciences and Pharmacy

Rights statement

© 2024 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

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