When we hear that someone “died of old age,” it sounds nice, right? It feels tidy and comforting, like the body simply powered down after a long, respectable run. But when scientists actually look at what’s really going on, through autopsies, that sweet story falls apart fast.
A growing body of research suggests nobody dies from aging itself. People die from very specific things. Hearts fail. Lungs give out. You have a stroke. Even centenarians who seemed fine days earlier don’t pass away because time ran out. They die because an organ did.
That point sits at the center of a new review by scientists Maryam Keshavarz and Dan Ehninger at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases, published in Genomic Psychiatry. The researchers sifted through decades of autopsy data across humans and animals, and the pattern was blunt. Aging raises risk but it doesn’t pull the trigger.
In humans, cardiovascular disease dominates. When researchers examined thousands of autopsies, heart attacks, strokes, and cardiopulmonary failure accounted for the vast majority of deaths. In one analysis of people over 85 who died suddenly outside hospitals, heart-related events caused about three-quarters of deaths. Even among people over 100 once described as “healthy,” none died of aging. Their bodies failed in traceable ways.
Zoom out across species, and the story stays consistent, just with different weak spots. Mice mostly die of cancer. Rats and dogs, too. Fruit flies tend to die when their gut lining collapses. Worms lose the ability to swallow. Each species has its own biological Achilles’ heel. Aging doesn’t kill them. Something specific does.
That distinction matters because it pokes holes in how aging research is often framed. Drugs like rapamycin and interventions like intermittent fasting extend lifespan in mice, but mainly by delaying cancer deaths. The mice still die of cancer, just later. That’s useful, but it’s not the same thing as slowing aging itself.
The review also takes aim at popular “biological age” tests that claim to measure how fast you’re aging. These tools predict health outcomes well, but they don’t explain why aging happens. As the authors note, it’s closer to guessing someone’s age from wrinkles than understanding what caused the wrinkles in the first place.
Autopsies are important here because they correct assumptions. Doctors and families usually misidentify causes of death without them. “Natural causes” sounds neutral, but it hides the real mechanics.
Aging, according to this research, isn’t a cause of death. It’s a condition that makes specific failures more likely. That’s a subtler, less cute story. It’s also harder to sell. But if scientists want to extend human life in meaningful ways, they may need to stop chasing immortality and start getting better at preventing the exact things that actually end it.
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