Professor Rose Anne Kenny

We all know that we're ageing, but how we age is something that is largely within our control.

And my next guest says that the ages of 30, 50 and 70 are vital moments when it comes to how we will age.

Let's find out more with Professor Roseanne Kenny, who's head of the Ageing Research Programme at Trinity College Dublin and is with me here in the studio.

Hello.

Hello, how are you?

Lovely to see you.

Thank you.

So the numbers as we see them going up, we can't do anything about that, right?

We are going to age every year.

That's inevitable.

But how it happens, a lot of that is within our control.

A lot of that is within our control.

This is a very active research area at the moment.

In the last couple of decades, it's just escalated because a lot of very wealthy people have a vested interest in understanding it and they hope modifying it.

So what we've learned latterly is that the process isn't linear.

That means it's not occurring gradually at the same rate from the day we're born until the day we exit.

Rather, it's much more like a stairs.

And every so often in the stairs, at three time points probably, there's an accelerated ageing.

And that's roughly, and it varies from person to person, but roughly age 30, 50 and 70.

It's a bit depressing, isn't it?