Trending News: If You End Up Living Forever, You May Have These To Thank For It
Why Is This Important?
Because you can’t outrun Father Time â€" or can you?
Long Story Short
Researchers at the University of Toronto have found that in studying the breast tissue of mice, removing certain types of cells can virtually halt the aging process.
Long Story
We can all agree that breasts are wonderful things for myriad reasons, but are they so awesome that they may one day contribute to the end of aging? The answer is yes, according to researchers at the University of Toronto, who found what appears to be the key to anti-aging in studying the breast tissue of mice.
“[Breast tissue] is a fundamental tissue that is constantly reorganizing. It develops at puberty. It goes through cycles of change in the adult female. New structures appear and regress,†said Professor Rama Khokha. “It is therefore a good system to explore in order to understand tissue maintenance and epithelial cell turnover â€" the cells that underlie carcinomas, the most frequent type of cancer.â€
In our bodies, what we know as aging is the body’s failure to repair tissue over time. That duty falls on cells called metalloproteinases, which decrease with age due to a reduction in stem cells. The metalloproteinases are regulated by tissue inhibitors of metalloproteinases (TIMPS), and the two have a very tenuous relationship. If the TIMPS fail to sufficiently rein in the metalloproteinases, cells proliferate and you get cancer. If the TIMPS maintain too hard a line, stem cells disappear, tissue doesn’t get repaired and you still get cancer.
To get to the bottom of the metalloproteinases/TIMPS relationship, the researchers decided to remove one or more of four types of TIMPS from mice. Over time, they found that the removal of TIMP1 and TIMP3 allowed in the re-proliferation of stem cells in mice of all ages.
“Normally you would see these pools of stem cells, which reach their peak at six months in the mice, start to decline. As a result, the mammary glands start to degenerate, which increases the risk of breast cancer occurring,†explains Khokha. “However, we found that in these particular mice, the stem cells remained consistently high when we measured them at every stage of life.â€
What’s odd is that the proliferation of stem cells in this instance doesn’t appear to lead to an increased risk of cancer, which has researchers scratching their heads. Could it be that cancer is the result of some interaction between stem cells and TIMP1 and TIMP3? Good question! That’s why, the researchers say, the next step is to figure out the mechanism at work.
This is obviously light years away from human trials, but anything that might slow or stop the aging process deserves all the attention it can get.
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Drop This Fact: Anti-aging can’t be studied enough - 77% of women with breast cancer are over 50 when diagnosed.
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