Crossword clues for senescence
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Senescence \Se*nes"cence\, n. [See Senescent.] The state of growing old; decay by time.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1690s, from senescent + -ence. Related: Scenescency (1660s).
Wiktionary
n. 1 (context biology English) The state or process of ageing, especially in humans; old age. 2 (context cell biology English) Ceasing to divide by mitosis because of shortening of telomeres or excessive DNA damage. 3 (context gerontology English) Old age; accumulated damage to macromolecules, cells, tissues and organs with the passage of time. 4 (context botany English) Fruit senescence, leading to ripening of fruit.
WordNet
Wikipedia
Senescence (from , meaning "to grow old," from senex) or biological aging (also spelled biological ageing) is the gradual deterioration of function characteristic of most complex lifeforms, arguably found in all biological kingdoms, that on the level of the organism increases mortality after maturation. The word "senescence" can refer either to cellular senescence or to senescence of the whole organism. It is commonly believed that cellular senescence underlies organismal senescence. The science of biological aging is biogerontology.
Senescence is not the inevitable fate of all organisms and can be delayed. The discovery, in 1934, that calorie restriction can extend lifespan twofold in rats, and the existence of species having negligible senescence and potentially immortal species such as Hydra, have motivated research into delaying and preventing senescence and thus age-related diseases. Organisms of some taxonomic groups ( taxa), including some animals, even experience chronological decrease in mortality, for all or part of their life cycle. On the other extreme are accelerated aging diseases, rare in humans. There is also the extremely rare and poorly understood " Syndrome X," whereby a person remains physically and mentally an infant or child throughout one's life.
Even if environmental factors do not cause aging, they may affect it; in such a way, for example, overexposure to ultraviolet radiation accelerates skin aging. Different parts of the body may age at different rates. Two organisms of the same species can also age at different rates, so that biological aging and chronological aging are quite distinct concepts.
Albeit indirectly, senescence is by far the leading cause of death (other than in the trivially accurate sense that cerebral hypoxia, i.e., lack of oxygen to the brain, is the immediate cause of all human death). Of the roughly 150,000 people who die each day across the globe, about two thirds — 100,000 per day — die of age-related causes; in industrialized nations, moreover, the proportion is much higher, reaching 90%.
There are a number of hypotheses as to why senescence occurs; for example, some posit it is programmed by gene expression changes, others that it is the cumulative damage caused by biological processes. Whether senescence as a biological process itself can be slowed down, halted or even reversed, is a subject of current scientific speculation and research.
Usage examples of "senescence".
The only physiognomic problem with Albertine was her tendency to burn out the cells, like in diseases of senescence.
Love, courtship, marriage, babies, grandparenthood, senescence, life-support, heavily monitored institutionalized death, and the survivors left arguing about what to do with the chipped china: the old, old human progression would have flowed like hydrogen through the fuel cell of a new 2025 Wuhan Panda.
McDade bitched at the meeting that if he had to watch Nightmare on Elm Street XXII: The Senescence one more time he was going to take a brody off the House's roof.
Gambling on a continuation of the worst aspects of the human condition – disease, senescence, and death – looks like a good way to lose money, and a deflationary spiral lasting almost fifty hours has taken down huge swaths of the global stock market.
Most people eventually picked up that kind of economical motion if their bodies didn't nose-dive into senescence by middle age, before they had time to mature, but this looked like the product of hard training, if not anabolic steroids.
Rumour is spreading throughout gated shelter communities in the American mid-west: a vaccine against senescence, a slow virus coded in the genome that evolution hasn’.