Aging begins at the moment of conception
MSU scientists have found out when the aging of the body begins
Andrey Gorbachev, "Search"
The staff of the Belozersky Research Institute of the Moscow State University together with colleagues from Harvard studied the question of when human aging begins. The results of the study are published in the journal Cell Reports (Kinzina et al., Patterns of Aging Biomarkers, Mortality, and Damaging Mutations Illuminate the Beginning of Aging and Causes of Early-Life Mortality).
There are many opinions when a person's aging begins (at the moment of birth, when puberty is reached, when maximum cognitive or physical functions are reached, etc.). The classical point of view is also that aging is an increase in the probability of death. However, if we consider a large sample of data, we can see that the mortality curve has a U-shaped shape: in the first years of life, mortality is high, then it decreases and reaches a minimum by about 9 years, after which it begins to increase monotonously.
"We believe that aging is a variety of injuries accumulating in the body, due to which the loss of functions of individual cells, tissues, organs and systems is gradually observed, and we considered the issue of the beginning of aging from this point of view," said the head of the study, professor of Moscow State University Vadim Gladyshev.
"The analysis of epigenetic DNA tags correlating with biological age, as well as data on the accumulation of mutations, suggests that aging in this sense (accumulation of damage) begins immediately after the formation of the organism – that is, in fact, at the moment of conception or shortly after it. As for the decrease in mortality with age observed in the first years of life, it is obviously not related to aging, but is partly explained by the death of carriers of unsuccessful combinations of genetic alleles, which we also provide indirect evidence," said Elvira Kinzina, the first author of the article.
The work was carried out by methods of bioinformatics and statistics. To confirm the conclusions made in the article, a lot of diverse information was collected and analyzed from open sources: databases of healthcare systems and specialized molecular genetic resources, the authors of the study report.
The MSU Laboratory of Systemic Biology of Aging was established in 2017 on the basis of the A.N. Belozersky Research Institute of Physico-Chemical Biology at the expense of the government "megagrant".
The authors of the work were also Dmitry Podolsky and Sergey Dmitriev.
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