Laura Tran in The Scientist:
As time marches on, aging is inevitable. Naturally, a person can accumulate wrinkles, laugh lines, stress, and cellular damage. Of these, damaged cells can take multiple paths: they can undergo programmed death; they can proliferate uncontrollably and become cancer; or they can become senescent cells. They don’t claw their way out of graves, but senescent cells are the body’s biological zombies—damaged, unable to divide, but very much metabolically alive. Instead of dying like normal cells, these “undead” entities can avoid immune system clearance and linger in the brain and other parts of the body. “They are no longer the original cell that they once were,” explained Miranda Orr, a translational neuroscientist at Washington University School of Medicine (WashU Medicine). Orr added that senescent cells not only differ from their initial form but also vary by the cell type within the tissue they came from, the stress triggers, and whether the aging process is healthy or pathological.
Cellular senescence has a complex relationship with the body.1 These cells have beneficial roles in development, tissue regeneration, and wound healing.
More here.
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