DRUSE

There’s a special issue in the journal Mechanisms of Ageing and Development devoted to cancer and ageing.

Below is the intro from the editors:

“An understanding of the relationship between aging and cancer is of more than mere academic interest. Biomedical research aims to intervene to prevent both. However, if the hypothesis that some aspects of the aging process itself evolved to suppress cancer is true, how will it be possible to restrain both aging and cancer?

This intellectual conundrum is intensified by the belief that cells need time to accumulate sufficient mutations for carcinogenesis to occur. Chronological time is, of course, the same for short and long-lived animals, so why is cancer a major cause of death of short-lived species like mice, as well as long-lived species such as humans (in protected environments in which death from external hazards is rare)? It seems that cancer incidence rates are governed not by chronological time but by processes that determine lifespan, at least in mammals. Thus, cancer incidence begins to rise at about the midpoint of the life span for most mammalian species. There must therefore be other explanations for why cancer rates (for most types of cancer) increase with age in both short- and longlived animals.”