TUESDAY, Oct. 8, 2024 (HealthDay News) -- Any form of breast cancer treatment appears to speed the aging of the recipient's cells, a new study finds. “For the first time, we're showing that the [aging] signals we once thought were driven by chemotherapy are also present in women undergoing radiation and surgery,” said study lead author Judith Carroll .
“While we expected to see increased gene expression linked to biological aging in women who received chemotherapy, we were surprised to find similar changes in those who only underwent radiation or surgery," said Carroll. She's an associate professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), as well as an investigator at UCLA Health's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center. The findings were published Oct.
7 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute . As the researchers explained, the rigors of breast cancer have long been linked to accelerated aging. Fatigue, declines in thinking and memory and increasingly physical frailty can plague survivors.
Just how big a contributor to those declines is cancer treatment? To find out, the UCLA team spent two years tracking the gene expression of blood cells in women undergoing breast cancer treatment. They were looking for genetic markers of cellular aging, including responses to DNA damage, cellular senescence (when cells cease dividing), and markers of inflammation. Cellular senescence is an especially potent sign of aging, bec.