Parkinsonism and senescent cells
By aging at the cellular level, scientists mean the loss of cells' ability to divide. Accumulating in the body, aged cells begin to secrete harmful factors, which leads to tissue damage and chronic inflammation.
In the new work, scientists focused on aging astrocytes – cells of the nervous system, which carry mainly "auxiliary" functions in the nervous tissue and have previously been little studied in the context of the development of Parkinson's disease. Nevertheless, post-mortem studies have shown that more aged astrocytes accumulate in the tissues of patients.
In their experiments, the researchers studied a sporadic – unrelated to genetics and occurring randomly – model of the disease in mice. Cell aging was activated using paraquat, a toxic herbicide for which a link with the manifestation of Parkinson's disease in farmers was previously shown. Experiments with cell cultures of human astrocytes have confirmed that exposure to herbicide "ages" cells.
To selectively affect aged cells, the researchers used genetically modified mice. Their genome has a built-in gene sequence that "turns on" only in aging cells. If they are then treated with ganciclovir, this will cause apoptosis – cell death. Scientists estimate the effectiveness of this "cleaning" system at 70-80%. Experiments on mice showed that after ganciclovir, animals in which Parkinson's disease was induced with paraquat showed fewer symptoms of neurodegeneration.
Scientists consider the main advantage of their work to be the fact that they managed to prevent the development of the disease not in a genetic, but in a sporadic model of Parkinson's disease, since it accounts for 95% of cases.
In addition, scientists suggest that chronic inflammation caused by aging astrocytes may be a significant factor in the development of other neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease, for which the largest pharmaceutical company recently despaired of seeking a cure.
An article with the results of the study was published in the journal Cell Reports (Chinta et al., Cellular Senescence Is Induced by the Environmental Neurotoxin Paraquat and Contributes to Neuropathology Linked to Parkinson's Disease – VM).
Scientists associate the accumulation of aged cells in the body not only with the development of specific diseases, but also with the aging of the body as a whole. Earlier, another research group extended the life of laboratory mice by 20%, "cleansing" their body of cells that had lost their potential for division.
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