Responses to Age-Slowing Interventions Differ by Organ and Gender

Once one starts to investigate, tissue type by tissue type, the effects of interventions known to modestly slow aging, one finds differences. This could be a matter of differences in the biodistribution of a particular therapeutic agent, or it could be that various forms of age-related damage are more or less significant in different organs, or that the regulation of stress responses differs from tissue to tissue, such that some therapeutics target a regulatory pathway more relevant to a kidney than a lung, for example. All of this implies that great deal of work lies ahead, if every potential therapy must be mapped by its effects on every type of tissue in the body, and optimization proceeds tissue type by tissue type. The ability to study and compare organ aging in the context of organismal aging has recently been documented using a geropathology approach. This concept consists of identifying and grading age-related histopathologic lesions so that a quantitative score is established for each organ allowing for comparison of lesion scores between all organs examined and between all animals in a specific cohort. Therefore, the contribution of each organ to aging can be assessed, in contrast to studying the effect of aging or age-related disease on each organ. Geropathological interrogation of individual organs provides a powerful look at the morphologic changes associated with increasing age in an organ-dependent manner. For example, based on severity of age-r...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs