alt Hacker News> Aging muscles heal more slowly after injury—a frustrating reality familiar to many older adults.
> In skeletal muscle, this decline is largely driven by impaired function of muscle stem cells (MuSCs)
I take it that as mitosis (cell division) gets slower with age, there's also simply no way aging muscles could potentially not heal more slowly?
So slower mitosis and then in addition to that muscle cells going into a "less repair, more survival" mode. Darn, sucks to get old.
No known mechanism, but cross species checks would imply that the schedule was evolved and has some control mechanism.
Species that evolved before the Devonian period tend not to age and instead grow through their entire lives. There is no mechanistic understanding for the wild variation in species lifespans.
So the natural question in these studies is what would happen if we simply told the muscles not to age this way. It’s plausible that this aging schedule evolved due to other factors independent of the biological constraints. It’s also plausible that evolution removed some other important components for longer lived stem cells.