Aging is driven by hallmarks fulfilling the following three premises: their age-associated manifestation, the acceleration of aging by experimentally accentuating them, and the opportunity to decelerate, stop, or reverse aging by therapeutic interventions on them.

We propose the following twelve hallmarks of aging: genomic instability, telomere attrition, epigenetic alterations, loss of proteostasis, disabled macroautophagy, deregulated nutrient-sensing, mitochondrial dysfunction, cellular senescence, stem cell exhaustion, altered intercellular communication, chronic inflammation, and dysbiosis.