The human body is a complex biological system, and as we grow older, the underlying processes that govern our health begin to shift in ways that can lead to chronic disease. Among the most closely linked are aging, inflammation, and cancers like mesothelioma. These three forces interact in subtle but powerful ways.
Understanding their biological connections can offer insight into how we age, why inflammation can become dangerous, and how this environment sometimes promotes cancer development.
Scientists have made significant progress in untangling these relationships, and emerging research continues to shine a light on how these mechanisms work together to influence human health over time.
What Is Aging?
Aging is often viewed as our “internal clock” that gradually leads to a decline in our body’s function. However, at the cellular level, it’s the result of accumulated changes over time. Every time a cell divides, its DNA must replicate.
Human cells have a protective structure at the ends of chromosomes called telomeres. These act like the plastic tips on shoelaces, preventing DNA strands from fraying. However, these structures shorten every time a cell divides. Eventually, they become too short to protect the DNA, causing the cell to either die or enter a state called senescence.
This cellular activity is a double-edged sword. While it prevents damaged cells from dividing, which helps protect against cancer. At the same time, these cells don’t just sit quietly, they release a cocktail of pro-inflammatory chemicals.
Over time, these secretions contribute to what scientists refer to as “inflammaging,” a state of chronic, low-grade inflammation that characterizes aging tissues.
Understanding Inflammation
Inflammation is the immune system’s first response to infection or injury. It’s designed to be short-lived and targeted. In its acute form, inflammation helps fight pathogens, remove damaged cells, and kickstart healing.
However, when inflammation becomes chronic, it can hurt the body rather than help it.
Chronic inflammation doesn’t just occur in obvious places like joints or skin. It simmers silently in tissues, blood vessels, and organs. Factors such as obesity, poor diet, stress, smoking, and exposure to environmental toxins can all fuel this process. With time, chronic inflammation damages DNA, alters cellular environments, and interferes with normal tissue function.
This persistent immune activation plays a significant role in a range of age-related diseases, including cardiovascular disease, neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s, and, of course, cancer.
Unlike acute inflammation, which turns off once the threat is neutralized, chronic inflammation lacks a natural off switch, creating a breeding ground for long-term damage.
How Cancer Hijacks Aging and Inflammation
Cancer is often described as a disease of aging. Statistically, the risk of cancer increases with age, and the reasons are rooted in biology. As people age, DNA damage accumulates. The body’s repair mechanisms slow down, and the immune system’s ability to detect and destroy abnormal cells weakens.
In this vulnerable state, chronic inflammation provides fertile ground for cancer cells to grow.
The inflammatory environment helps tumor cells in several ways. Inflammation promotes angiogenesis, the formation of new blood vessels that tumors need to grow. It also creates a shielded microenvironment where cancer cells can evade immune detection. Certain immune cells, normally responsible for defense, become hijacked by tumors and begin to support their survival and spread.
Inflammatory molecules like cytokines, chemokines, and prostaglandins—normally used to fight infections—can inadvertently encourage mutations, cell proliferation, and metastasis (the spread of cancer cells).
In essence, cancer takes the natural tools of the immune system and uses them for its own benefit.
The Immune System’s Role in Surveillance and Failure
A youthful immune system patrols the body effectively, identifying and eliminating damaged or abnormal cells. This surveillance declines with age, a phenomenon known as immunosenescence.
As our immune cells begin to lose function and diversity, our body becomes less adept at fighting infections and recognizing early-stage cancer cells. Natural killer (NK) cells, which specialize in destroying tumors and virus-infected cells, become less active with age. T-cells, another crucial component of immune defense, show reduced responsiveness.
The combined effect is a weakened defense against not only foreign invaders but also internal threats like emerging cancer cells.
Adding to the complexity, tumors can exploit age-related immune decline. Some cancers manipulate immune checkpoints, proteins that regulate the immune response, to evade detection. Others recruit regulatory T-cells or myeloid-derived suppressor cells, which normally help prevent excessive inflammation, but in cancer, suppress anti-tumor immunity.
Lifestyle, Aging, and Inflammatory Risk
Our lifestyle choices can have a profound impact on the connection between inflammation, cancer, and aging.
Diets high in sugar and processed foods often contribute to systemic inflammation. A reduction in active lifestyle behaviors reduces the body’s ability to clear damaged cells, as well. Smoking, alcohol, and pollution add to the body’s oxidative stress burden.
On the other hand, healthy habits can mitigate some of these risks. Regular exercise improves mitochondrial function and reduces inflammatory markers. Anti-inflammatory diets rich in vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and omega-3 fats support healthy aging.
Sleep, stress management, and maintaining a healthy weight all contribute to a more balanced immune response. Researchers are increasingly focusing on how interventions that reduce inflammation or enhance immune function might delay aging and reduce cancer risk.
Strategies like intermittent fasting, calorie restriction, and pharmacological approaches such as metformin or rapamycin show promise in early studies.
These approaches don’t stop aging, but they may slow its progression and reduce its most harmful consequences.
Emerging Therapies and the Future of Anti-Aging Medicine
Science has moved beyond the notion that aging is an untouchable process. While we can’t stop time, we’re beginning to understand how to influence the quality of aging. Therapies aimed at reducing chronic inflammation or removing senescent cells are already in clinical trials.
Anti-inflammatory drugs, immune modulators, and senolytics are being tested not only for cancer treatment, but also for prevention and longevity.
Immunotherapy
Immunotherapy, which trains the immune system to fight cancer, has changed the landscape of oncology. Some of these therapies are now being considered in the context of aging—can we rejuvenate immune function in older adults to better protect against disease?
Likewise, interventions that improve mitochondrial health or enhance DNA repair may have broad implications for age-related diseases.
Inflammaging
Among less conventional approaches, immunologist and oncologist at the Institute of Mount Sinai, Dr. Miriam Merad, has suggested using allergy drugs and other seemingly unlikely medications to dampen a condition known as “inflammaging.”
A recent Wall Street Journal article on her work states, Inflammation fuels the high rate of cancer in people over 50, leading researchers to test anti-inflammatories like allergy drugs to fight it.
In her years examining malignant tumors to find out why patients over 50 years old account for 90% of cancer diagnoses, she and her team believe that the answer is the aging immune system. The article goes on to state, “Their studies of individual immune cells in human lung tumors…have revealed how chronic, or pathogenic, inflammation in older people—dubbed inflammaging—interferes with the immune system and fuels cancer growth.”
The key focus of these studies is currently to separate beneficial inflammation, which protects our bodies from things like microbes and tumors, from the pathogenic inflammation that promotes cancer progression, including diffuse malignant pleural mesothelioma stemming from chronic inflammation caused by asbestos exposure.
The future of aging research lies in integration.
Several drugs are being tested for their anti-aging potential. Senolytics aim to remove senescent cells. Metformin and rapamycin are being studied for their ability to reduce inflammation and slow age-related diseases, including various forms of cancer.
By looking at the connections between inflammation, immune decline, and cancer development, scientists aim to design treatments that don’t just target disease, but the underlying biological wear and tear that leads to it.
At Frost Law Firm, we believe that biology, lifestyle, and medicine intersect to shape health as we age, and the link between aging, inflammation, and cancer is compelling evidence of this.
While we may not be able to stop the clock, understanding how these processes work together gives us tools to slow it down and live healthier, more fulfilling lives along the way.
