[salehenrahman]

Senescent cells themselves do not exist to prevent tumor growth.

Cells becoming senescent is a mechanism that exists to prevent them from becoming a possible tumor, due to DNA damage.

The problem with senescent cells is that accumulation of them results in tissues not functioning correctly. Eliminating them should make tissues function better.

After all, your own immune system gets rid of senescent cell, but as we age, I believe your immune system is unable to keep up.

[rp1]

The paper says fisetin reduced the number of senescent cells in a sample. It’s not clear if that means the cells were eliminated or if the were prevented from entering a senescent state. Do you know the answer? The former sounds better than the later.

[salehenrahman]

I have no idea.

All I can say is that the paper overwhelmingly uses the term "senolytic", which means to "kill off the senescent" (I'm assuming that it refers to senescent cells), as opposed to "senostatic", which means to "delay senescence".

Additionally, the concern brought up by the paper, is that senescent cells are known to be resistant against something called "apoptosis", which is a term to describe "programmed cell death". The goal of the paper is to explore a compound—fisetin—for its senolytic capabilities. Whether it is successful at finding that, I haven't fully read the paper to see if they have identified fisetin as a senolytic, or a senostatic agent.

With that said, however, some of the graphs in the paper does highlight that as fisetin dose increases, not only do senescent cells get depleted, but so do total number of cells. If we were working with a purely senostatic agent, relative to a control, the senescent cells would be much lower, but the overall cell count would be much higher, which is not the case with fisetin. Does this mean that fisetin is a senolytic? Maybe not; it could just indiscriminately target all cells, resulting in fewer cells. Or maybe it is. Who knows.

Or maybe my logic about cell counts regarding senostatic vs senolytic may be entirely wrong.

Whatever it is, I haven't read the whole paper.