Aging of the inceptive cellular population: the relationship between stem cells and aging

Catherine E. Symonds^1,³, Umberto Galderisi^1,², Antonio Giordano^1,³

¹Sbarro Institute for Cancer Research and Molecular Medicine, Center of Biotechnology, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122, USA
²Department of Experimental Medicine, Section of Biotechnology and Molecular Biology, Excellence Research Center for Cardiovascular Diseases, Second University of Naples, Naples, Italy
³Department of Human Pathology and Oncology, University of Siena, Siena, 53100, Italy

Received: February 4, 2009Accepted: April 1, 2009Published: April 2, 2009

Copyright: © 2009 Symonds et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

The average life expectancy worldwide has about doubled and the global population has increased six fold over the past century. With improving health care in the developed world there is a proportional augmentation in the treatment necessary for elderly patients occasioning the call for increased research in the area of aging and age-related diseases. The manifestation of this research has been focalized on the causative cellular processes and molecular mechanisms involved. Here we will discuss the efforts of this research in the area of stem cells, delving into the regulatory mechanisms and how their de-regulation could be attributed to aging and age-related diseases.