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Home Q & A Board Biology-Related Homework Help Cell Biology
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CarbonRobot CarbonRobot
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5 months ago
How much does our stem cell numbers change by age? I don't mean efficacy of stem cells. The total number or percentage compared to total cells in body.
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Anonymous
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#1
5 months ago
Could it be that it's not the number of stem cells that declines, but it is the effect of stem cells aging that leads to their inefficiency? Perhaps they age because they begin to accumulate genetic mutations and DNA damage over the years.
CarbonRobot Author
wrote...
#2
5 months ago
Quote from: Anonymous (5 months ago)
Could it be that it's not the number of stem cells that declines, but it is the effect of stem cells aging that leads to their inefficiency? Perhaps they age because they begin to accumulate genetic mutations and DNA damage over the years.

Well surely the number must go down as we continue to need specific tissues?
wrote...
#3
Educator
5 months ago
Correct, there's also link that shows that stem cell count decrease with age.

Excerpt
Aging also affects MSCs in humans and in animal models as indicated by the decrease in the bone marrow MSC pool and also shifts their lineage differentiation from one that usually favors osteoblastic differentiation to one that prefers adipogenic differentiation[35], which is largely responsible for the gradual and aging-associated shift of hematopoietic (red) marrows to fatty (yellow) marrows, and which also contributes significantly to the etiology of senile osteoporosis.

Quote from: Anonymous (5 months ago)
Could it be that it's not the number of stem cells that declines, but it is the effect of stem cells aging that leads to their inefficiency? Perhaps they age because they begin to accumulate genetic mutations and DNA damage over the years.

Are you alluding to telomere shortening and epigenetic changes? These theories have held for quite some time now to explain cell aging. For example, the progressive shortening of telomeres leads to senescence, apoptosis, or oncogenic transformation of somatic cells.
Source  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3370421/
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