A Sizable Portion of the Damage of Chemotherapy may be due to Cellular Senescence

Now that much more attention and funding is turning to cellular senescence as a cause of aging, a fair number of new discoveries are being made regarding the specific links between age-related disease and the growing presence of senescent cells in old tissues. Some of them seem almost obvious in hindsight, connections that researchers should have long assumed to be likely, such as senescent foam cells accelerating the progression of atherosclerosis. Now that senescent cells can be cleared effectively in the laboratory, proof of these connections is comparatively simple to obtain, and so the evidence is piling up month after month. The open access paper I'll point out today provides evidence for another connection that has the look of something that should be self-evident in hindsight, between cellular senescence and the harmful side-effects of cancer chemotherapy. It is PDF only at the time of writing, I'm afraid. Chemotherapy at the levels needed to suppress cancer is enormously unpleasant, sometimes even fatal, and no-one with any other option would ever undergo such a treatment. Worse, it has a large impact on future life expectancy, as the outcomes for cancer survivors having undergone chemotherapy look much the same as those of life-long smokers. But why is chemotherapy so harmful? We can point to numerous side-effects ranging from outright toxicity to dysregulation of important cellular activities in a number of organs. The one thing that all chemotherapies shoul...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs