New research has mapped how breast tissues change as women age. The findings help to explain why breast cancer cases are higher in older women, and this could potentially help in finding new ways to fight this disease.
The study, which appeared in Nature Aging, was conducted by a team from the UK-based University of Cambridge and the Canada-based University of British Columbia, and they created a map that covered at least 3 million breast tissue cells. This is the most extensive such map so far available.
The map revealed how these breast tissues change as someone ages, and they found an especially notable shift coinciding with menopause.
The study’s joint first author, Pulkit Gupta, explains that their research showed that major shifts occur in breast cancer cells as women age and that dramatic alterations happen during menopause. He added that changes also occur while women are in their twenties during the peak childbearing age, but those changes weren’t as pronounced as those that occur when a woman hits menopause.
The study found that cell numbers in the breast fall with age, and that is accompanied by alterations to the structure of those remaining cells.
Because of those changes, conditions are created for cancerous cells to thrive and multiply, resulting in the development of breast cancer in the later years of a woman’s life. While breast cancer is also being found in younger women, the occurrence is much lower than the frequency of the disease in women who are 50 or older.
To arrive at their findings, the researchers obtained breast tissue samples from more than 500 women who underwent surgery to reduce the size of their breasts. Those women were aged 15-86 years. The team leveraged advanced imaging techniques and created detailed patterns of how those tissues changed as aging occurred.
They found that cell division occurred less often with age and immune cell numbers dropped as one got older. Stromal and epithelial cell numbers also dropped with age, and this wasn’t surprising because these cells are involved in breast milk production and that need declines as a woman ages.
Notably, there was an increase in fat cells within breast tissue, and a decline in blood vessels. The breast cells in younger women tended to have more T-cells and B-cells, which are immune cells that can pinpoint and attack cancerous cells when they form. Reduced numbers of these cells as women grow older could explain why cancer finds it easier to establish and spread in their breast tissues.
From this study, it is strongly plausible that the rate at which breast tissues age could be linked to the likelihood of breast cancer development. The insights revealed by this research could provide some food for thought to companies like Calidi Biotherapeutics Inc. (NYSE American: CLDI) that focus on developing immunotherapies indicated for metastatic breast cancer and other malignancies.
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