A View of Stochastic DNA Damage in Aging

Cancer is thought to be a disease of aging because we accumulate randomly distributed damage to nuclear DNA as we age. The older you are the more of this damage you have. Sooner or later the right combination of mutations occur in a cell that slips past the monitoring of the immune system and other defensive systems, which themselves decline with age due to other forms of damage, and it runs amok to grow a cancer. It remains an open question as to whether this nuclear DNA damage in aging is significant in any other way besides cancer over the present length of a human life span, though it is the default assumption in the research community that this is the case. There is no good evidence, however, to show that DNA damage and only DNA damage is the cause of other meaningful changes in cellular metabolism characteristic of aging. You can of course correlate damage with progress in aging, and show that calorie restriction - to pick one example - slows the accumulation of nuclear DNA damage along with other measures of aging, but aging is a global phenomenon: these correlations don't even come close to implying direct causation. Finding a more definitive connection is an experiment that lies somewhere in the near future, enabled by more capable biotechnologies and a novel study setup devised by clever researchers. In any case, this recent research is one narrow example of a way in which random nuclear DNA damage causes cancer - or rather more cancer in this case: For a small ...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs