Diabetes is associated with various nervous disorders, such as cognitive deficits, depression, and Alzheimer's disease, and that may be caused by neural stem cell dysfunction.
"Our experiments showed that mice that have progeria, a disorder of premature aging, were healthier and lived longer after an injection of stem cells from young, healthy animals," says senior investigator Laura Niedernhofer, M.D., Ph.D. "That tells us that stem cell dysfunction is a cause of the changes we see with aging".
Other causes proposed include aberrant wound healing mechanisms [2] [4], genetic instability [5], stem cell dysfunction [6], metabolic disorder [7], and neuronal dysfunction [8].
Analyses of stem cells have begun to define age-associated changes that might underlie age-associated stem cell dysfunction.
In addition, aging is the most common cause of stem cell dysfunction [ 5].
Aging leads to increased stem cell dysfunction, and as a result leukemia can develop in failed attempts by the marrow to return to a homeostatic condition after stress or injury.
Moreover, it will be important to understand if and how the miRNA-106b~25 cluster is controlled by signals derived from the neurogenic environment, given the evidence that major shifts in pathway activities contribute to stem cell dysfunction during ageing.
In this context DC and related diseases can now be regarded as disorders of "telomere and stem cell dysfunction".
However, it still remains unknown exactly how mtDNA point mutations cause stem cell dysfunction and moreover why we see tissue-specific alterations in either the stem cells directly or stem cell fate and downstream differentiation events?
The association between adult stem cells dysfunction and aging has been subjected to extensive research.
