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. Researchers have suspected for years that these cells play a key role in age-related disease. Most recently, researchers from the Jackson Laboratory at the National Institutes of Health have collected and analyzed 18 tissues from healthy humans across their life span to understand exactly how these cells are involved in the aging process. The early results of this ongoing research project, published in the journal Nature Aging2, showed that removing senescent cells from human tissue delayed the onset of age-related issues and was associated with longevity. 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. In the meantime, we can still focus on the healthy aging tools that have plenty of science backing them up. There is a long list, but some of the more doable ones include:
