- Genre:medical
- Sub-genre:Clinical Medicine
- Language:English
- Pages:188
- eBook ISBN:9798317843823
- Paperback ISBN:9798317843816
Book details
Overview
Why do we age? Why do our bodies gradually lose their ability to repair themselves? Can science slow the process?
Aging begins in our cells. Over a lifetime, our cells accumulate damage, their repair systems become less effective, and some enter a dysfunctional state that can damage the tissues around them. Scientists are now uncovering the biological processes—the hallmarks of aging—that lie behind aging and many of the chronic diseases that accompany growing older.
Our Aging Cells takes readers inside this rapidly changing field of science. In clear, accessible language, Bruce Brodie explains what happens to our cells as we age, how those changes affect virtually every organ in the body, and how a better understanding of cellular aging is changing the way scientists think about disease and longevity.
Most intriguing is a new possibility: rather than treating the diseases of aging only after they become symptomatic, could we someday intervene in the aging processes that help cause diseases of aging?
From senescent “zombie” cells and declining stem cells to senolytics, gene therapy, and cellular reprogramming, Our Aging Cells explores the science that may help us not simply live longer, but remain healthier for more of the years we have.
Aging was once regarded largely as an inevitable process of wear and tear. Today, scientists increasingly understand it as a series of biological processes occurring within our cells—changes that can be studied, measured, and, in laboratory animals, sometimes modified.
Description
Our Aging Cells tells the story of this emerging science.
Our cells possess remarkable systems for maintaining and repairing themselves, yet these systems gradually become less effective with age. Telomeres shorten, DNA is damaged, mitochondria become less efficient, stem cells lose some of their capacity for renewal, and senescent cells accumulate. These and other changes are part of what scientists call the hallmarks of aging.
This discovery has helped give rise to geroscience, a new approach to aging and medicine. Instead of considering heart disease, cancer, neurodegenerative disease, arthritis, and other disorders of later life solely as separate diseases, geroscience asks whether some of them share underlying mechanisms of aging. If those mechanisms can be modified, might it someday be possible to delay several age-related diseases at once and extend the portion of life spent in good health—our healthspan?
Bruce Brodie guides the reader from the basic biology of cells through the aging of skin, muscles, cardiovascular system, blood, bones and joints, and nervous system. He then explores some of the most promising—and still experimental—frontiers of aging research, including stem-cell therapy, gene therapy, senolytic drugs that target senescent cells, and programming cells to a more youthful state.
Our Aging Cells does not promise a cure for aging. Instead, it offers an accessible guide to what scientists have learned, what remains uncertain, and why the biology of aging has become one of the most exciting areas of modern medical research.
The ultimate goal may be less about adding years to the end of life and more about adding healthy years to the life we already have.
