Stem Cell Aging: Potential Effects on Health and Mortality.

Aging in a statistical sense is the increasing probability of death with increasing time of an organism's existence (1, 2). Can we extrapolate this to self-regenerating tissues and most particularly to the stem cells that drive the replenishment of lost and damaged cells throughout life? To be succinct, how close is the linkage between the vitality of the stem cell population and organismal longevity? These questions are currently without clear answers and the nature of the linkage, if any, is likely to be complicated, but is nonetheless conceptually compelling. However, in the most straightforward and blunt analysis, limiting numbers of hematopoietic stem cells, for example, resulting in aplastic anemia is an infrequent cause of death (3). Moreover, the hallmark property that distinguishes stem cells from most other somatic cells, their ability to self-replicate, in theory should provide a life-long supply. It was shown many years ago that hematopoietic stem cells could be transplanted into myeloablated recipients and continue to produce large numbers of differentiated blood cells over a time period that greatly exceeded the lifespan of the donor mouse (4). Serial transplants, in which an original bone marrow graft is passaged through a series of recipients, put even greater demands on stem cell proliferation and differentiation and thus demonstrate the tremendous regenerative potential of these cells. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]