a group of inherited conditions resembling accelerated aging. Victims generally die before their teens of strokes or heart attack, looking like little old men or women, bald, bent over, with wrinkled faces, and so on.
Progeria narrowly refers to Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria syndrome, but the term is also used more generally to describe any of the so-called "accelerated aging diseases". The word progeria is derived from the Greek for "prematurely old". Because the "accelerated aging" diseases display different aspects of aging, but never every aspect, they are often called segmental progerias by biogerontologists.