Cellular Senescence: Difference between revisions

[[File:Incidence Rate of Age-Related Diseases.png|thumb|Incidence Rate of Age-Related Diseases <ref name="katzir-2021"/>]]

Age-related diseases are the main causes of death and disability. These diseases include cardiovascular disease, cancer, Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, kidney failure, and osteoarthritis. They affect different organ systems and have different origins, including mutations, dysregulated homeostasis, fibrosis, and degenerative processes. <ref name="katzir-2021"/>

Despite the differences between these pathologies, they have certain universal features in terms of their incidence rate. The [[wikipedia:Incidence_(epidemiology)|incidence rate]] of a disease is defined as the number of new cases per year divided by the size of the population. The incidence rate of each age-related disease rises roughly exponentially with age. For many of the diseases, the incidence rate then drops at very old ages. Interestingly, the slope of the rising part of the incidence curve is similar for many age-related diseases, in the range of 6–8% per year (see Figure) . This similarity hints at a common biological process of aging that governs the onset of these different diseases. It is thus of interest to develop theories for the origin of the incidence of age-related diseases, in order to detect such a common process. <ref name="katzir-2021"/>

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<ref name="katzir-2021">Katzir, I., Adler, M., Karin, O., Mendelsohn-Cohen, N., Mayo, A. and Alon, U. (2021), Senescent cells and the incidence of age-related diseases. Aging Cell, 20: e13314. https://doi.org/10.1111/acel.13314</ref>