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VIDEO: Decades of research point to therapies to discourage bone aging
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ATLANTA — In this video exclusive, Sundeep Khosla, MD, professor of medicine and physiology at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, discusses his work involving sex steroids, coupling and age-related bone loss over 3 decades and offers some clinical implications of the findings.
Beginning in the late 1980s, Khosla and colleagues explored the roles of testosterone and estrogen on bone formation and demonstrated that estrogen is the dominant regulator of bone metabolism in both women and men. That work has recently been extended by Joel Finkelstein MD, associate director of the Massachusetts General Hospital’s Bone Density Center, and colleagues to show that bone density and microarchitecture are also mainly determined by estrogen.
In a series of translational and clinical studies, Khosla and colleagues examined bone turnover with sex-steroid deficiency to show how bone resorption couples with bone formation and becomes unbalanced with age. Building on research by James M. Kirkland, MD, PhD, head of the Kogod Center on Aging at Mayo, and colleagues on cell senescence in multiple tissues, Khosla’s group determined that bone cells do undergo senescence with aging.
“This is a particularly exciting area because it opens up the possibility of developing compounds, so-called senolytics, that specifically kill senescent cells in multiple tissues without harming normal cells,” Khosla said.