Regulatory Drift and Termination Failure: A Systems Framework for Chronic Disease Prevalence

Chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, metabolic disorders, and autoimmune conditions account for the majority of morbidity and healthcare expenditure in high-income societies. Despite extensive mechanistic knowledge and increasingly sophisticated interventions, chronic disease prevalence continues to rise, and durable resolution remains rare. This paper proposes a systems-level reframing: many chronic diseases emerge not from failure to initiate adaptive responses, but from failure to reliably terminate them. Persistent environmental, physiological, and institutional interference drives gradual regulatory drift, masked by compensation, until tolerance thresholds are crossed and pathological states stabilize. The framework centers termination reliability, recovery latency, and cumulative interference as upstream control variables. It outlines a taxonomy of regulatory failure modes, explains multimorbidity as shared control-layer degradation, and identifies early sentinel indicators detectable using existing healthcare data. The analysis remains morally neutral and system-focused, integrating biological regulation with healthcare system dynamics. The contribution is explanatory rather than prescriptive. It does not propose treatments, but reorients attention toward the mechanisms governing return to baseline, loss of plasticity, and long-term resilience in complex adaptive systems.