Are Senescent Cells A Key To Healthy Aging? What We Know So Far

Healthy aging is a topic that always garners a lot of attention. And it makes sense! Aging is universal. None of us (except maybe Jennifer Lopez and Paul Rudd?) are exempt from the passage of time. 

As you age, your risk of developing a disease or falling severely ill increases. Age is one of the major risk factors1 for inflammatory diseases, as well as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, atherosclerosis, dementia, and cancer. 

Senescent cells3 are a unique type of cell in that they stop dividing in response to stressors but don't die like other cells. Instead, they stick around wreaking havoc in the body, producing chronic inflammation. 

Researchers have suspected for years that these cells play a key role in age-related disease—and it was confirmed when the Jackson Laboratory at the National Institutes of Health collected and analyzed 18 tissues from healthy humans across their life span to understand exactly how these cells are involved in the aging process.

You might read this and think: Time to get rid of all my senescent cells! But unfortunately, it's not quite that simple. Like most cells, senescent cells play multiple roles in the body. The molecules expressed by senescent cells are involved in embryonic development, wound healing, and childbirth too. 

This makes them a complicated and ambiguous area of research—and this study is just scratching the surface. It doesn't tell us exactly how to leverage senescent cells for a longer, healthier life while still taking advantage of their benefits. That said, it does give us the clear message that therapies that remove senescent cells—an area of medical research called senotherapeutics—is absolutely worth paying attention to.

In the future, these therapies might just hold the key to health span and longevity. Researchers are hopeful that the more we learn about senescent cells, the better we can become at identifying individuals at higher risk for age-related disease, too.