Zombie Cells Are Hiding in Your Body, Could Killing Them Stop Aging?

Key Takeaways

I'm gonna start this episode by bumming you out everybody dies eventually even if you manage to avoid bear attacks or grievous bodily harm something in your own body will go wrong sooner or later usually later though since age is the single biggest risk factor for disease strangely we don't really understand why our bodies deteriorate as we age and so we don't know how to prevent it but there are a few scientists who think they know how to stop the relentless march of time and they figured it out by accident the researchers in question we're studying why some cells in our bodies become cancerous they believe turning off a gene called bub r1 could be the culprit so they genetically engineered mice with bub r1 deactivated but the mice didn't develop tumors as expected instead they aged rapidly and by the time they were just three months old they had thinning hair and cataracts the mice lost weight developed heart problems and died much earlier than normal when the scientists examine their bodies they notice that the mice had accumulated a particular type of cell called senescence cells senescence cells were once healthy normal cells but they've been damaged or their DNA has mutated to avoid passing that damage onto their daughter cells they stop replicating and start putting out signals for the immune system to come and clean them up they're not exactly dead but they're not doing anything either unless you count putting those chemical signals out which you should because it turns out they can affect nearby cells and cause inflammation if the immune system cleans up these cells it's no big deal but it appears that over time the immune system stops responding and the senescence cells build up some people like in these cells to zombies but to me they seem more like grumpy retirees they've done their job at the plant until they can't work anymore so they sit on their porch yelling and hollering for the police to come and take them away the police come a couple times but eventually they stop and soon none of the neighbors can sleep anymore eventually those neighbors retire too and they sit on their porch screaming and the neighborhood becomes a terrible place to live the researchers found that when they regularly remove these cells from normal mice the mice stayed healthier and lived 25% longer so the researchers think that clearing out these cells could improve longevity in humans as well but of course it's not that simple it's never simple first and foremost is the problem that's in since cells vary from one tissue to another there's no one distinct marker for all of them that a treatment can target so the researchers are working on treatments that can target multiple markers at once but even if you could totally cleanse out all of these senescence cells in your body at the same time you might not want to there's evidence that senescence cells play a role in helping you recover from injury the same researchers that found all these benefits of removing the cells found that wounded mice healed slower without them so scientists and doctors will have to be careful how they apply this treatment if it ever turns out to be effective in humans - aging is something we can't escape but with continued research maybe one day we'll think of old age as a treatable disease rather than an inevitable fate if you like this video you should subscribe we're friendly I promise we've come up with all sorts of kooky ideas to stop aging like infusing young blood into our veins gulia covers that here when scientists first discovered senescence cells in 1961 and suggested it might be aging on a cellular level people called them idiots funny