Senescent Cells Accelerate the Accumulation of More Senescent Cells

Aging is an accelerating process, in which new symptoms of degeneration appear ever faster as the decline progresses. This is characteristic of the aging of any complex system, in that damage to component parts - and the dysfunction that results - tends to produce further damage and dysfunction. To pick one example of many in human biochemistry, cross-linking in the extracellular matrix causes stiffening of blood vessels, which in turn causes hypertension, which in turn causes pressure damage to delicate tissues. Or accumulation of amyloid-β in the brain leads to accumulation of tau that in turn causes cell death and dementia. Thousands of such chains of cause and effect can be found in human aging, few of which are catalogued end to end and in all their detail. The roots of aging and the causes of mortality at the ends of aging are fairly well mapped, but the complexity in between is still a matter of a few paths through a dark forest. The lack of understanding of the details of the progression of aging, how metabolism is disrupted, and how and why that produces the next form of damage and dysfunction in the chain of cause and consequence, is one of the reasons why it is a slow and expensive process to attempt to alter metabolism to be more resilient. That is true even given the easily established altered states of metabolism, such as that produced by calorie restriction, in which aging is modestly slowed. Metabolism is ferociously complex and incompletely understood...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs