Quote: (04-09-2018 04:16 PM)Higgs Bosun Wrote:
Some vast misconceptions and ignorance about basic biology going on in this thread.
-No, telomere shortening is not the primary cause of aging. For starters, telomeres are irrelevant for the vast majority of cells in your body. It is only cells that divide throughout life such as those of the immune system, gut epithelia, and skin which go through the 60-80 replication cycles required to significantly shorten telomeres. Your skeletal and cardiac muscle cells do not divide past adulthood, and crucially, neither do neurons. Telomere maintenance would do nothing for your heart and brain and other organs.
-You start declining long before you get to an age where telomere shortening is a factor. Physical decline is biologically detectable beginning in your mid 20's, at which point your telomeres are still firing on all cylinders. DNA damage in dividing cells begins to accrue with the very first division because DNA replication is an error prone process (DNA polymerase proofreading function is excellent but there are billions of base pairs to check, so even a small error rate multiplied by billions yields significant damage per replication cycle). This doesn't even get into the fact that your DNA is under constant assault by free radicals, radiation, and other environmental mutagens completely unrelated to telomere shortening.
-Telomeres are carcinogenic. Cancer is a stochastic, dynamic process, you get mini-cancers likely thousands of time in your life but only rarely does a cancer locus manage to survive the immune system and accumulate the mutations needed to grow and become invasive. All cancers have mutations that either overexpress telomerase, or use alternative methods to elongate their telomeres and allow them to replicate endlessly. In other words, by artificially maintaining telomeres you are enabling the development of cancer by providing a pathological driver that the cancer would have to develop on its own to all cells in your body on a silver platter. When you're a geezer, all your cells have undergone decades of DNA damage and are just waiting to trip the fuck out and cause cancer, by upping teomeres you're literally mixing oxidizer into the fuel and waiting for the inevitable spark.
-Lastly, aging is not a "huge evolutionary advantage" like somebody here wrote and it is not selected for. Evolution doesn't care if you age or not, but since evolution doesn't go out of its way to make sure you live forever, entropy wins out by default.
Some great points there but;
-It`s quite certain that ageing is an evolved trait. Our children are born young after all. Why? Because our reproductive line (gametes) doesn`t age. Why? Because those cells express telomerase. Other organisms that express telomerase in all cells are biologically immortal also, like lobsters and some clams etc. This proves that senescence evolved at a later stage in the history off life.
-Telomere length is not irrelevant for the vast majority of cells. It`s true that some celle divide much faster than other`s, and those are also the cells that are most likely to go cancerous. The epithelium is not just the gut lining, but the breast duct, prostate, epidermis, colon, ovary, esophagus etc. All the linings of the body. All the most common cancers except for lung cancer, which is primarily caused by smoking, occur in these cells, mostly because they get to a point where the telomeres get critically short and radical mutations occur as a result. (There are dietary factors like elevated blood sugar and insulin/IGF-1 elevation at play here also.)
Leucocyte telomere length have essential roles in the pathogenesis of heart disease,
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2900586/ and also neurodegenerative diseases.
They attenuate the effects of inflammation/oxidative stress, thereby reducing the risk of disease developing in those organs. Importantly short fibroblasts telomeres are involved in fibrosis, which in turn is a crucial element in heart disease. (There are different cell types in an organ.) Fibrosis causes an excess of collagen production which can destroy the function of an organ/tissue. This process is triggered by short telomeres (often accelerated as a result of environmental factors like smoking and alcohol etc.) and is at the core of the aetiology of numerous diseases like heart disease, cirrhosis, COPD, perhaps even male pattern baldness. I could go on and on about this, but the point is that different cells types effect each other in many ways. Weakest link basically.
Physical decline is a gradual process as you said, but that fits well with how ageing progresses. Again I refer back to our gametes (sperm and egg cells.) they accrue mutations at a rate of only about a 1/10th of what somatic cells do, yet they have the same repair mechanisms as somatic cells. This fits the model of things like reduced endogenous antioxidant function when telomeres get shorter. Evolution probably "allows" for some mutations in order to have adaptability by the way. The renowned biologist Cynthia Kenyon was able to prove that UV rays can`t cause DNA damage on it`s own. A gene must be switched on for it to happen, indicating that evolution has come up with a solution in the first place, but again organisms need some adaptation.
You point about cancer is a very good one, and I agree that this is not settled science, as I mentioned in the OP. Yes cancer uses telomerase to immortalize itself, but studies show that when you introduce telomerase (over-expression) into cells, both in vitro and in vivo (mice) you reduce the rate of cancer. Also if you take mice cells grown in vitro that have critically short telomeres and introduce them into living mice again they cause cancer every time. The tumor actually evolves before telomerase is expressed in the tumor. So cancer it seems is caused by mutations, and short telomeres is a source of radical mutations, hence it causes cancer. But that doesn`t mean you can`t get cancer if you have long telomeres, since the rest of the DNA can accumulate mutations faster than even well functioning cells can repair them. Environmental elements that evolution did not account for might play a role here, like radiation, unnatural toxins, smoking, alcohol, refined carbs etc. So if you have cells that are badly damaged by these elements, then even things like antioxidants can be causative in cancer development. Beta-carotene is for example proven to increase the risk of lung cancer, but
only in smokers. It has the opposite effect in all other studies. In this context I agree that longer telomeres can cause cancer. But the telomeres are not long enough in that scenario to help repair cells properly, however they can (like antioxidants) help the cells past the cyclin checkpoints and thereby avoid apoptosis. This allows the cells to accumulate even more radical mutations that will "turn on" the cancer metabolism. But if the telomerase was fully expressed it would have the opposite effect.