Skip to main content

Cell aging


Cell aging

  is due to genetic factors, diet, social conditions, and presence of age related disease like diabetes, atherosclerosis, osteoarthritis.

     There are progressive accumulations of sub lethal injuries that lead cell death or reduced capacity to respond to injury.

 The cell function decline progressively with age: reduction of ATP synthesis, nucleic acids, cytoskeleton and enzyme proteins, uptake of nutrients, DNA repair.

Morphology:-


 Nucleus is bilobed, mitochondria vacuolated distorted GA, ER reduced in number and accumulation of lipofucsins.


There are advanced glycosylation end products due to non enzymatic glycosylation which facilitate the cross linking of adjacent proteins and abnormal folding of the proteins.

 

The mechanism of aging centers into 2 interrelated processes:

1.  Genetic determined clock.

a)    Incomplete chromosome ends (telomere shortening.) The telomere, a short repeated sequence of the DNA that forms the linear end of the chromosome, is responsible for insuring completion of DNA replication and protects fusing of the end of the chromosome with other chromosomes.

   The length of the telomere is conserved by a telomerase (ribonucleic acid protein) by adding the segment lost in the division. The telomerase activities are expressed in germ cells, low in stem cells and usually absent in somatic cells.

b)     Gene clock: there are genes that control the rate and timing of aging.

 

2- Metabolic events.

 The increase of the oxygen radicals produce modification of the protein lipids and nucleic acids. This results from the increase of the oxidative damage in the aging manifested by the presence of lipofucsins in the aged cells.

















Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Frank-Starling Law of the Heart

Frank-Starling Law of the Heart Two physiologists, Otto Frank and Ernest Starling, demonstrated that the strength of ventricular contraction varies directly with the end-diastolic volume (fig. 14.2). Even in experiments where the heart is removed from the body (and is thus not subject to neural or hormonal regulation) and where the still-beating heart is filled with blood flowing from a reservoir, an increase in EDV within the physiological range results in increased contraction strength and, therefore, in increased stroke volume. This rela- tionship between EDV, contraction strength, and stroke volume is thus a built-in, or intrinsic, property of heart muscle, and is known as the Frank-Starling law of the heart.

Effect of pH and Temperature

Effect of pH and Temperature on Oxygen Transport In addition to changes in P O 2 , the loading and unloading reac- tions are influenced by changes in the affinity (bond strength) of hemoglobin for oxygen. Such changes ensure that active skeletal muscles will receive more oxygen from the blood than they do at rest. This occurs as a result of the lowered pH and increased temperature in exercising muscles. The affinity is decreased when the pH is lowered and increased when the pH is raised; this is called the Bohr effect. When the affinity of hemoglobin for oxygen is reduced, there is slightly less loading of the blood with oxygen in the lungs but greater unloading of oxygen in the tissues. The net effect is that the tissues receive more oxygen when the blood pH is lowered (table 16.8). Since the pH can be decreased by carbon dioxide (through the formation of carbonic acid), the Bohr effect helps to provide more oxygen to the tissue...

Pathophysiology of heart failure

Pathophysiology of heart failure In heart failure, the heart may not provide tissues with adequate blood for metabolic needs, and cardiac-related elevation of pulmonary or systemic venous pressures may result in organ congestion. This condition can result from abnormalities of systolic or diastolic function or, commonly, both. Although a primary abnormality can be a change in cardiomyocyte function, there are also changes in collagen turnover of the extracellular matrix. Cardiac structural defects (eg, congenital defects, valvular disorders), rhythm abnormalities (including persistently high heart rate), and high metabolic demands (eg, due to thyrotoxicosis) also can cause HF.