Although aging is inevitable, there are steps you can take to support healthy living. It’s important to understand how lifestyle components can impact your body and its aging process. Transitions from health to disease are characterized by dysregulation of biological networks under the influence of genetic and environmental factors, often over the course of years to decades before clinical symptoms appear. Understanding these dynamics has important implications for preventive medicine. Aging is characterized by degenerative changes that occur as a result of the accumulation of genetic and cellular damage due to a loss of adaptive capacity to repair itself. There are 9 well-established hallmarks of aging.