Premature aging is a disease that consists in very sharp and rapid aging of the skin. It is also called progeria, the name is derived from the Greek word progeros.
For the first time, they openly declared the presence of the problem of rapid aging in some children in 1886 in America. The good news is that this disease is very rare, at the moment there are 53 people worldwide who suffer from premature skin aging. No adherence to a certain gender has been revealed, that is, such a misfortune can happen with both a boy and a girl.
Recognizing premature aging in the early stages can be very difficult, because at birth the baby is apparently completely healthy. The first signs can be detected only after a year or two of the baby’s life. In this case, the development of the main features is characteristic. These include sudden weight loss and stunting, hair begins to fall out, and the skin wrinkles. As complications, a dislocation of the femoral part can occur, as the bones become weak. In practice, there have been cases of serious cardiovascular disease, such as stroke or heart attack.
Premature aging is currently considered one of the most important problems that scientists are still studying, since no reliable cure has been found. Life expectancy in patients is very small, and on average it barely reaches 14 years. The maximum length of stay is 21 years, and it is noted that death, like in old people, most often occurs due to the development of cardiovascular pathologies.
Scientists have proven that in 90% of cases of this disease, premature aging is the result of a mutation in a particular gene. Genotype abnormalities occur. Such a disease cannot be transmitted by heredity, that is, if one child has premature aging, then you should not worry about the health of future children and be afraid of the next conception. Of course, there are situations when two relatives fall ill in the same family. But scientists classify this as an accident, but not a pattern or heredity. The probability of this incident is only 1 percent out of 100 possible.
The manifestation of the main symptoms, for example, sudden hair loss, weight loss and stunting, can only lead to certain thoughts. A specialist can accurately diagnose premature aging of children only through genetic research. As noted above, there is no clear way to treat this terrible disease, so active work is being done in this area. During progeria, the cell nucleus is destroyed . It is believed that the drug farnesyltransferases, which is intended for the treatment of cancers, is able to restore the cellular structure, including the destroyed nucleus. While experiments were conducted on mice, they showed that there were minor improvements. The trial involved 13 mice that were injected with medication for three months, with only one fatal outcome.
But the hope in sick children never fades, because medicine is developing every day and with leaps and bounds it is moving towards solving many important problems. For example, in America, experts have put forward a version according to which the antibiotic rapamycin can become a real obstacle to the active destruction of cells. In normal life, it is prescribed to people who are planning an organ transplant operation , since rapamycin reduces the functioning of the immune system. In the course of numerous experiments and studies, it was proved that the composition of antibiotics is able to gradually stop a rapidly progressing disease. But before full confirmation, he should go through many more checks.