Oxidative Stress in the Aging Process: Fundamental Aspects and New Insights

Aging researches have experienced an unprecedented advance over recent years. The comprehension of process leading to age-associated alterations is at moment of the highest relevance for the development of new treatments for age-associated diseases, such as cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer and cardiovascular accidents but also to encourage healthy gain of years with high standard of quality of life. It is widely considered that the accumulation of molecular and cellular damage influenced by reactive oxygen species might orchestrate the progressive loss of control over biological homeostasis and the functional impairment typical of aged tissues. Here, we review how resulting oxidative stress-redox disruption signal took part in the mechanisms of ageing physiology and physiopathology. The discovery that the rate of aging is controlled, at least to some extent, by genetic pathways and biochemical processes conserved in evolution is discussed and integrate to common denominators of aging in different organisms, with special emphasis on mammalian aging. The aspects considered in revision are: genomic instability, telomere(definition) attrition, epigenetic alterations, loss of proteostasis(definition), deregulated nutrient sensing, mitochondrial dysfunction(definition), cellular senescence(definition), stem cell exhaustion, and altered intercellular communication. Based on these critical aspects the revisited aging associated mechanisms causing damage, the compensatory responses leading to homeostasis reestablishment and the interconnection between them are analyzed and explore with the final goal of identifying pharmaceutical targets to improve human health during aging, with minimal side effects.