Senescent Cells Make Everything Worse in the Aging Lungs

Here I'll point out a recent open access paper that covers the various ways in which accumulated senescent cells harm the lungs in old age. The count of senescent cells rises with age in all tissues, the consequence of increased cellular damage on the one hand and progressive failure of the immune system to destroy these cells on the other. The presence of these cells is one of the contributing root causes of aging, in fact. They generate a mix of signals known as the senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP) that promotes chronic inflammation, destructively remodels the extracellular matrix structures necessary for correct tissue function, and changes the behavior of nearby cells for the worse. When it comes to the lungs, it is already known that senescent cells make people more vulnerable to respiratory infection, and are responsible for loss of elasticity and degraded normal function of structures in the lungs. Further, senescent cells are strongly implicated as a cause of fatal lung diseases such as idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, due to their harmful effects on tissue structure. If senescent cells are such a bad deal, why do we have them? The short answer is that evolution tends to produce systems that work well at the outset, during reproductive life span, and then fall over badly later. The antagonistic pleiotropy view of the evolution of aging describes this picture in more detail; in essence there is little evolutionary pressure after the end of reproduc...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs