SENS-ational news for grandma’s brain!
Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) is the scientific term that
refers to a variety of regenerative medical therapies aimed at repairing the
human brain from all the age-related damage it may suffer. The so-called state
of negligible senescence refers to
the condition in which all the loss in brain functions is delayed for as long
as possible.
The SENS project consists in a series of interventions on
the patients brain in which the tissue is repaired and restored to prevent any
kind of senile dementia or even more serious loss of brain functions.
The SENS treatment currently works in this order in which
gerontological and geriatric interventions prevent the aging of the brain from
becoming a pathology. Geriatrics is defined as “the attempt to stop damage from
causing pathology” while gerontology is “the attempt to stop metabolism from
causing damage.
Considering the vast array of aging damage that a human
brain can suffer there are just as many different SENS treatments that focus on
curing a particular problem. Some of the most futuristic treatment option
manage to prevent mutations in both the mitochondria and the DNA which could be
an important tool even in fighting cancer, not just brain damage.
Another interesting type of SENS treatment is the so called
LysoSENS which manages to clean the intracellular junk. The junk is made up of
all the molecules that cannot be digested by our cells and thus accumulate
inside our cells, reducing their efficiency.
Currently there is still a lot of criticism around all of
the SENS treatments as many members of the medical community are skeptic that there
will be a day when these treatment options will actually be used on patients
around the world.
All there is left for us to do is wait and see, surely
though the thought of a never aging brain is very appealing, at least to me!
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