Discussing the DNA Damage Hallmark of Aging at Long Long Life

The Long Long Life team will be putting together a set of videos in the months ahead, one for each of the Hallmarks of Aging. The first to be published covers the hallmark of DNA damage, stochastic mutational change to nuclear DNA that is widely thought to make a meaningful contribution to the dysregulation of cell behavior in aging. This is evidently the case for cancer risk, as cancer is caused by mutations that enable rampant, unregulated growth, but may only be important otherwise when mutations occur in stem cells or progenitor cells that are able to propagate the mutations widely in tissues. The Hallmarks of Aging is a list of common processes and outcomes found in aging, and considered by a sizable fraction of the research community to cause aging. While the hallmarks overlap with the list of forms of cell and tissue damage described in the earlier Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), a view of aging as accumulated molecular damage, the two differ in that some of the hallmarks are clearly not fundamental causes of aging in the SENS view. They are some way downstream from the forms of molecular damage that would be considered true causes of aging. For example, the hallmarks include loss of proteostasis and dysregulation of nutrient sensing. Both of these are managed by collections of cell behaviors and states; we must ask what causes those behaviors and states to change, and the answer must be some form of underlying damage. [Video] The ...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Activism, Advocacy and Education Source Type: blogs