Senolytics for prevention

Chronic back pain worries more than 15 million U.S. adults, leading to billions in health care costs and the loss of working days. Degeneration of the intervertebral discs, which normally soften and support the vertebrae, often accompanies aging and is the main cause of lower back pain.

A study by Makarand Risboud and James Maguire Jr. from Thomas Jefferson University showed that treatment with senolytics reduces degeneration of intervertebral discs in mice. The results may form the basis for a new way to prevent and treat chronic back pain.

Currently, the approved treatment of lumbar spine pain includes surgery and injections of glucocorticosteroids. Given the senile age and the presence of several chronic diseases at the same time, which usually accompany patients with chronic back pain, surgery is often contraindicated, and epidural steroid injections do not work well. Long-term use of strong painkillers prescribed for back pain, including opioids, is associated with the risk of addiction.

In search of an effective, non–invasive and safe way to treat back pain associated with degeneration of intervertebral discs, researchers turned to a class of senolytics - substances that remove aged cells from the body.

Aging cells in every tissue of the body accumulate with age. They not only cease to perform their functions, but also secrete destructive enzymes and inflammatory proteins that affect nearby healthy cells. Senolytic drugs remove these decaying cells, leaving room for their replacement with new cells. Recent studies have proven that it restores tissue functions. In particular, two senolytics (dasatinib and quercetin) have shown efficacy for the treatment of scarring of lung tissue, and they are now being tested in clinical trials.

But the structure of the lung tissue is very different from the cartilage tissue of the intervertebral discs, and medications that are effective in one organ will not always be as useful in another.

To find out whether senolytics could improve the condition of aging-related intervertebral discs affected by the degenerative process, the researchers injected dasatinib and quercetin into young, adult and old mice every week. They expected to get the greatest effect in the oldest animals, because more aging cells accumulated in this group. Surprisingly, the treatment brought more benefits and actually had a protective effect in younger animals.

In young and adult mice, by the time they reached senile age, there was less degeneration of the discs and fewer aging cells compared to mice receiving placebo. In other words, the therapy was most effective when the aging cells were just beginning to appear. In addition, the mice needed a weekly injection until they reached old age – a much longer period of time than when treating other diseases with senolytics.

Note that the researchers did not find any undesirable effects of long-term treatment. They plan to test the effectiveness of senolytics for the treatment of intervertebral disc degeneration on larger animals so that they can then proceed to clinical trials.

Article by E.J.Novais et al. Long-term treatment with senolytic drugs Dasatinib and Quercetin ameliorates age-dependent intervertebral disc degeneration in mice is published in the journal Nature Communications.

Aminat Adzhieva, portal "Eternal Youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru Based on Thomas Jefferson University: Drug Cocktail Reduces Aging-Associated Disc Degeneration.