7 days ago
- Health
- Wall Street Journal
How ‘Inflammaging' Drives Cancer—and Points to New Treatments
People are more likely to get cancer as they age. Dr. Miriam Merad has an unconventional idea of how that might be reversed: using allergy drugs and other seemingly unlikely medications to damp a condition known as 'inflammaging.'
The immunologist and oncologist has spent years examining malignant tumors to learn why people over age 50 account for nine in 10 cancer diagnoses in the U.S. She and her research team at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City have homed in on an answer: the aging immune system. Their studies of individual immune cells in human lung tumors, as well as in old mice, have revealed how chronic, or pathogenic, inflammation in older people—dubbed inflammaging—interferes with the immune system and fuels cancer growth.
