Eli5: why do muscles and joints ache or get stiff with age?
In: Biology
Your connective tissue gets stiff due to changes in aging – cartilage becomes thinner and there is less of the lubricating fluids between the joints. Bones change as you get older – as you become more inactive the bones loose mass. Hormonal changes can accelerate this. Given that joints are moving parts this becomes a vicious cycle- the joints rub together with less protection making movement hurt. Since movement hurts you’re less active – that causes your body to rob the bones of mass and that causes your joints to get stiffer.
Since these changes happen later on in life, when most humans are past their child-bearing ages, we can’t “breed” these changes out.
As for joints:
Bones are really hard so if two bones in a joint would touch each other while moving, they would ‘scratch’ and cause damage. To prevent this, our body puts a softer, protecting layer between two ‘touching’ bones. This layer is called cartilage. Cartilage is really great but it does accumulate damage over the years and unfortunately it’s unable to repair itself. (Because there are no blood vessels going through it). So older people usually have damaged cartilage in joints that have been used a lot over the years, causing pain.
As this might be on the same topic. How does vitamins / supplements work? Do they help if person is training like running, cycling a lot? Ho do they help?
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