I come from a family with dangerous knees. His 79-year-old father has had two total knee replacements, and his sister, at 54, also needs revision surgery. My left knee hurts when I walk downstairs and clicks when I bend it. This is a classic symptom of age-related osteoarthritis and is caused by: The cartilage that cushions the joints wears away.
But by the time you get to the point where you need to replace your knee, you may not need to do it. Instead, I’ll just swallow a few pills every once in a while and hopefully I can feel the pain in my knees go away.
Osteoarthritis isn’t just caused by wear and tear, it’s also caused by an accumulation of nasty cells that attack the knee joint from the inside out. These are called senescent cells, old or worn out cells that have reached the end of life or have been irreversibly damaged. They don’t die when they should, but instead lurk within the organization and cause problems.
Senescent cells are normally cleared by the immune system, but as they age they fail and accumulate, dripping toxins into their surroundings and turning other cells into villains. They are the main cause of a wide variety of age-related conditions, not only in the knees, but also in the heart, liver, muscles and brain.
It is no wonder, then, that researchers have long looked to senescent cells as potential targets for slowing, halting, or even reversing aging. A number of new drugs are currently in development, with some interesting results from human clinical trials. There is even hope that removing senescent cells will also evaporate other causes of aging.
Cellular senescence is…
