A Skeptical View of the Role of Nuclear DNA Damage in Aging It is evident and settled that stochastic nuclear DNA damage contributes to cancer. The more of it that you have, the worse your risk. What is still very much debated is whether nuclear DNA damage contributes meaningfully to degenerative aging, and how it does so. Most mutational damage to DNA occurs in regions that are inactive, in cells that have comparatively few divisions remaining before reaching the Hayflick limit. Even if damage alters the function of such a cell, in some non-cancerous way, it is unclear as to how this could amount to a meaningful contribution to loss of tissue function. The one school of thought is focused on somatic mosaicism, the spread of mutations throughout a tissue when mutational damage occurs in stem cells. […]
https://www.fightaging.org/arc....hives/2024/03/a-skep