A Specific Example of Harm Caused By Senescent Cells Permalink | View Comments (0) | Post Comment | Share | Posted by Reason Here's a detailed look at one narrow form of dysfunction caused by the accumulation of senescent cells in tissue. Senescent cells gather with age in all tissues, and similar processes are thought to take place throughout the body - which is why targeted removal of senescent cells is an important part of any future toolkit for rejuvenation:Quote:Renal aging is associated with an increased susceptibility to acute stress and tubular cell injury. While the young kidney has a remarkable capacity to recover from acute injury, the aging kidney loses this repair reserve and instead develops an increasing tendency for tubular atrophy and interstitial fibrosis. Our previous data suggest that a loss in tubular epithelial proliferative reserve contributes importantly to inappropriate repair in the aged kidney.We have previously shown that the proliferative potential of tubular cells declines with chronological age. In previous studies we linked the inability to increase cell cycling to somatic cellular senescence (SCS) by demonstrating that genetic induction of telomere shortening, as a model of telomere dependent SCS in mice, was associated with a decline in the tubular proliferative capacity. Ablation of the pro-senescent p16INK4A, on the other hand, resulted in improved regeneration and better proliferation following acute ischemic renal injury.Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0088071 Greater Personal Wealth Makes Being Old Seem More Tolerable Until you get to the point of retirement or incapacity, being older tends to mean being wealthier and more influential in your community: you are earning, saving, and interacting with people, and that adds up over the years. In the first stages of aging, when all you have suffered are comparatively minor pains, dysfunctions, and losses, being financially secure and well-connected in comparison to earlier years is a significant compensation. If you ask people in their 40s whether they would trade their present security, influence, and network for the flush (and lack of resources) of youth, then you might see some careful weighing of options.Life is a progression from a place of time, health, and no resources to a place of resources but neither health nor time, and these line items are valued accordingly at each stopping point along the way. So we see people spending vast sums on medical technology in the last stages of life, not just because it is enormously costly to try to compensate for or patch over the end of aging with the techniques available today, but more importantly because these people consider such an expense worth it. What were unthinkable sums for the poorer, younger version of an individual are spent on obtaining a little more time or small gains in freedom from pain and disability. The future of rejuvenation biotechnology will liberate us from these cruel calculations, and that goal is precisely why it is important.How people perceive their own well-being depends in part on wealth: up to a level of diminishing returns the more you have the better you feel about life. So the natural progression of increasing wealth