4 ms·
I’m not sure what the proper name is for this idea, but I consider ageing to be a trade-off between cell-regeneration, which maintains youthfulness, and mutatio
by Tycho 3y ago
I’m not sure what the proper name is for this idea, but I consider ageing to be a trade-off between cell-regeneration, which maintains youthfulness, and mutation-limitation, which reduces the chances of cancer. That is to say, if you “aged less”, you would get cancer more/sooner. Everything else, like the balance of chemicals in the body, I assume would be downstream of that.
- herval 3y agoI'm not a biologist, but I believe what you're talking about is telomerase?
- dillydogg 3y agoTelomeres are just repeats at the end of chromosomes to allow for replication. They aren't directly involved in replication fidelity beyond allowing for replication to proceed. I guess protecting genes near chromosome termini but that's different than the mutations you would expect in cancer.
- herval 3y agomy understanding is cancer gets more prevalent when the telomeres get old (short?), since it leads to more mutations/botched replication?
- dillydogg 3y agoI'm sorry for the delay, but this actually isn't quite right. Short telomere syndromes are not associated with cancer. In fact, it is long telomeres that have a strong association with cancer (largely because aberrantly activating telomerase can drive cancer development.) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22965356/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22965356/ for more on short telomere syndromes.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dillydogg 3y agoI don't think we can say that's true. There is some evidence that there is no association between body mass and age on cancer development in mammals. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04224-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04224-5