Time to Evict the ZOMBIES?
The average human life span is clearly on the increase, with the United Nations predicting there will be 3.7 million people over 100 (centenarians) by the year 2050. Many developed countries are reporting more supercentenarians every year, they being people over the age of 110. Since 1900 the average human life expectancy has risen from 31 years to 72 years, more than a twofold increase. The oldest of all is in Japan – Kane Tanaka at 117 years old. Japan is a standout country for supercentenarians, having well over 100 of them. Given the increasing average life expectancy over the last century, and the development of life saving and life prolonging technology, is there truly a finite upper limit on how long a human can live? There are some who claim that there are people alive today who could reach the age of 1,000. That may seem far fetched at this point, but there is technology being developed to take us further down this road.
“Cellular Senescence” is a scientific theory that is growing in popularity and can be briefly described as a biological phenomenon where an organism’s cells stop dividing. “Senescence” is defined as the state of being or becoming old. Back in the 1960’s, scientist Leonard Hayflick postulated that human cells can divide 40 to 60 times before becoming senescent, and this is now referred to as the “Hayflick Limit”. When a cell no longer divides or replicates many biologists call it a “zombie” cell.
Much like the mythical zombie, these cells are not technically dead, but they no longer behave like young healthy cells – they are alive but they are physiologically useless. This may go a long way to explaining why certain afflictions become prevalent in older humans. The zombie cells are accumulating while healthy cells are becoming fewer and fewer. There are many age related diseases, such as dementia, osteoporosis, cataracts, cancer, hypertension, and arthritis. These and more may have a significant zombie cell causal relationship.
Also, zombie cells can generate harmful chemical signals that infect nearby healthy cells, thereby increasing the total number of senescent cells. It is easy to theorize that increased zombie cells can lead to problems, like reduced tissue repair, chronic inflammation, formation of cancer cells, cognitive degeneration, bone weakening, and other age related maladies. When we are relatively young our bodies can naturally remove senescent (zombie) cells, but as we age this natural shedding process slows down and zombie cells begin to accumulate. The situation can get especially dire when our Immune system cells become senescent and are unable to control the rapid spread of zombie cells.
Bio-technologists are striving to develop a solution to the zombie cell invasion of aging organisms, positing that aging can be treated much like any other disease. There is an emerging class of medicines named “senolytics” – molecules that selectively induce the true death of zombie cells, allowing them to then be flushed naturally from the organism. The idea is to kill zombies, then evict them from the body, which could make for a very interesting and uplifting ZOMBIE movie – or would ZOMBIES always be scary?
Here is a snip from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Library of Medicine:
“Senolytic drugs are agents that selectively induce apoptosis of senescent cells. These cells accumulate in many tissues with aging and at sites of pathology in multiple chronic diseases. In studies in animals, targeting senescent cells using genetic or pharmacological approaches delays, prevents, or alleviates multiple age-related phenotypes, chronic diseases, geriatric syndromes, and loss of physiological resilience. Among the chronic conditions successfully treated by depleting senescent cells in pre-clinical studies are frailty, cardiac dysfunction, vascular hyporeactivity and calcification, diabetes, liver steatosis, osteoporosis, vertebral disk degeneration, pulmonary fibrosis, and radiation-induced damage. Senolytic agents are at the point of being tested in proof-of-concept clinical trials. To do so, new clinical trials paradigms for testing senolytics and other agents that target fundamental aging mechanisms are being developed, since use of long-term endpoints such as life- or healthspan is not feasible. These strategies include testing effects on multi-morbidity, accelerated aging-like conditions, diseases with localized accumulation of senescent cells, potentially fatal diseases associated with senescent cell accumulation, age-related loss of physiological resilience, and frailty. If senolytics or other interventions that target fundamental aging processes prove to be effective and safe in clinical trials, they could transform geriatric medicine by enabling prevention or treatment of multiple diseases and functional deficits in parallel, instead of one-at-a-time.”
This area of research is still young and may prove to not be a viable treatment for humans, even when animal trials show promising results. Time will tell whether bio-scientists are making a winning investment here.
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