Exercise as a Mild Senotherapeutic

Exercise is known to improve health and extend the healthy portion of life span, but not extend life span itself in mice. This is a much lesser effect than that of calorie restriction, which does extend maximum life span in addition to improving health. From a very high level view, both exercise and calorie restriction are similar, in that they trigger many of the same stress response mechanisms, making those mechanisms work harder to maintain cell function than they would otherwise have done. Evidently exercise and calorie restriction achieve this goal in quite different ways at the detail level, given the quite different outcomes.

One noted aspect of aging is the accumulation of senescent cells throughout the body. Cells become senescent constantly throughout life, in response to a variety of circumstances, but are removed quickly and efficiently in youth, either self-destructing or being destroyed by the immune system. This removal slows down with age, alongside an increased pace of creation of new senescent cells, allowing senescent cells to linger in ever increasing numbers. These cells adopt the senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP), producing inflammatory, disruptive signals that contribute to the development of tissue dysfunction and age-related disease. The size of this effect is meaningful, the harms done considerable, as illustrated by the rejuvenation produced in animal studies when senescent cells are selectively destroyed by senolytic therapies...

Source: Fight Aging! - January 5, 2021 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs