Transcriptomic Alterations During Ageing Reflect the Shift from Cancer to Degenerative Diseases in the Elderly

Overview

Journal Nat Commun

Specialty Biology

Date 2018 Feb 1

PMID 29382830

Citations 55

Authors

Peer Aramillo Irizar

Sascha Schauble

Daniela Esser

Marco Groth

Christiane Frahm

Steffen Priebe

Mario Baumgart

Nils Hartmann

Shiva Marthandan

Uwe Menzel

Jule Muller

Silvio Schmidt

Volker Ast

Amke Caliebe

Rainer Konig

Michael Krawczak

Michael Ristow

Stefan Schuster

Alessandro Cellerino

Stephan Diekmann

Christoph Englert

Peter Hemmerich

Jurgen Suhnel

Reinhard Guthke

Otto W Witte

Matthias Platzer

Eytan Ruppin

Christoph Kaleta

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Disease epidemiology during ageing shows a transition from cancer to degenerative chronic disorders as dominant contributors to mortality in the old. Nevertheless, it has remained unclear to what extent molecular signatures of ageing reflect this phenomenon. Here we report on the identification of a conserved transcriptomic signature of ageing based on gene expression data from four vertebrate species across four tissues. We find that ageing-associated transcriptomic changes follow trajectories similar to the transcriptional alterations observed in degenerative ageing diseases but are in opposite direction to the transcriptomic alterations observed in cancer. We confirm the existence of a similar antagonism on the genomic level, where a majority of shared risk alleles which increase the risk of cancer decrease the risk of chronic degenerative disorders and vice versa. These results reveal a fundamental trade-off between cancer and degenerative ageing diseases that sheds light on the pronounced shift in their epidemiology during ageing.

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