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Re:Scientists May Have Found Mechanism Behind Cognitive Decl... by Tycho on Sunday July 30, 2023 @08:18AM (#36930415)
I’m not sure what the proper name is for this idea, but I consider ageing to be a trade-off between cell-regeneration, which maintains youthfulness, and mutation-limitation, which reduces the chances of cancer. That is to say, if you “aged less”, you would get cancer more/sooner. Everything else, like the balance of chemicals in the body, I assume would be downstream of that.
Re:Scientists May Have Found Mechanism Behind Cognitive Decl... by herval on Sunday July 30, 2023 @08:28AM (#36930495)
I'm not a biologist, but I believe what you're talking about is telomerase?
Re:Scientists May Have Found Mechanism Behind Cognitive Decl... by dillydogg on Sunday July 30, 2023 @08:44AM (#36930608)
Telomeres are just repeats at the end of chromosomes to allow for replication. They aren't directly involved in replication fidelity beyond allowing for replication to proceed. I guess protecting genes near chromosome termini but that's different than the mutations you would expect in cancer.
Re:Scientists May Have Found Mechanism Behind Cognitive Decl... by herval on Sunday July 30, 2023 @03:50PM (#36935219)
my understanding is cancer gets more prevalent when the telomeres get old (short?), since it leads to more mutations/botched replication?
Re:Scientists May Have Found Mechanism Behind Cognitive Decl... by dillydogg on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @12:16PM (#36972937)
I'm sorry for the delay, but this actually isn't quite right. Short telomere syndromes are not associated with cancer. In fact, it is long telomeres that have a strong association with cancer (largely because aberrantly activating telomerase can drive cancer development.)

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22965356/ for more on short telomere syndromes.

Re:Scientists May Have Found Mechanism Behind Cognitive Decl... by dillydogg on Sunday July 30, 2023 @08:49AM (#36930647)
I don't think we can say that's true. There is some evidence that there is no association between body mass and age on cancer development in mammals.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04224-5