It is not uncommon in clinical practice to see a patient who is receiving cancer treatment
appear to age before your eyes. For example, a healthy sixty-five year old female
who “appears her stated age” is diagnosed with locally advanced breast cancer and
receives doxorubicin, cyclophosphamide, and paclitaxel. By the time she completes
chemotherapy she “appears older than her stated age.” The intensity of the treatment
seems to correlate with the rapidity of the aging process, with a bone marrow transplant
being an optimal example, whereby mantle radiation or chemoablation has been associated
with accelerating parameters of physiological aging by as much as 20 years [
[1]
]. After treatment is withdrawn, the acceleration of aging does seem to slow down,
sometimes even reverse, but often does not return to a pre-treatment level. How do
we understand the potential biologic underpinnings of this well-known clinical observation?
Perhaps merging the field of geriatrics (through understanding the hallmarks of aging)
with oncology (through understanding the mechanism of action of common cancer therapies)
can provide insights into this phenomenon.To read this article in full you will need to make a payment
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: March 21, 2019
Accepted:
March 11,
2019
Received in revised form:
February 22,
2019
Received:
January 13,
2019
Identification
Copyright
© 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
