Riggs J E
Department of Neurology, West Virginia University Health Sciences Center, West Virginia School of Medicine, Morgantown 26506-9180.
Mech Ageing Dev. 1993 Dec 31;72(3):165-81. doi: 10.1016/0047-6374(93)90098-c.
Many types of cancer are intrinsically linked to the process of aging. Aging, from the perspective of the second law of thermodynamics, can be viewed as associated with the inevitable and natural increase in informational entropy of the genome. The molecular biologic basis of increasing genetic informational entropy is the inherent and variable instability of different regions of genome. Colon cancer cells have been shown to have characteristic acquired genetic abnormalities, most commonly, deletions in presumed tumor suppressor genes. Age-specific colon cancer mortality rates in the US from 1958 to 1988 were subjected to longitudinal Gompertzian analysis, a method that may identify and distinguish among genetic, environmental and competitive influences upon mortality. The Strehler-Mildvan modification of the Gompertz relationship between aging and mortality can be used to determine a relative measure of the rate of increase in informational entropy (a reflection of genetic instability) for those genetic factors that are involved in the pathogenesis of colon cancer.
许多类型的癌症与衰老过程有着内在联系。从热力学第二定律的角度来看，衰老可被视为与基因组信息熵不可避免的自然增加相关。遗传信息熵增加的分子生物学基础是基因组不同区域固有的可变不稳定性。已表明结肠癌细胞具有特征性的后天遗传异常，最常见的是假定的肿瘤抑制基因缺失。对1958年至1988年美国特定年龄的结肠癌死亡率进行了纵向冈珀茨分析，这是一种可识别和区分遗传、环境及竞争对死亡率影响的方法。衰老与死亡率之间的冈珀茨关系的斯特勒-米尔德万修正可用于确定那些参与结肠癌发病机制的遗传因素的信息熵增加速率的相对度量（反映遗传不稳定性）。
