With over 75 million baby boomers in the U.S. alone, age-related diseases are a major concern in the health care system.

The connection between aging and cancer has become a pillar in medicine: we know that as we age, our cells tend to accumulate damaging changes in their DNA, eventually becoming unfit to perform their normal functions.

My lab has found that examining a cell’s RNA may have the potential to identify the changes that our cells gain from aging.

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The benefit of manipulating RNA rather than DNA is that the cell’s blueprint does not change, which could cause unpredictable, permanent changes to the cell.

This focus on RNA represents a potentially major shift in how scientists try to prevent cellular damage.

The causes of damaging changes to DNA are many.

Some mistakes occur while a cell divides.

It then inherits an incorrect DNA code from the parent cell.

This can lead to an aberrant, malfunctioning cell that leads to cancer or other life-threatening diseases.

Other hits are triggered by extrinsic factors, such as exposure to UV light or irritating substances.

While we can limit the exposure to some of these factors – for example, by putting sunscreen on and avoiding active or passive smoking – limiting other hits is out of our control.