Cell regeneration or cell regeneration is understood by physicians as the body’s ability to reject irreparable cells and thus heal damaged tissue with the help of newly produced cells. This process takes place in the course of cell division and can occur either once, cyclically or permanently, whereby the cells of the skin and liver, for example, are subject to permanent cell generation, while highly specialized cells such as those of the brain are not capable of division and therefore not capable of regeneration. In old age, the ability to regenerate decreases, with ever-increasing cell loss occurring throughout life due to permanent cell replacement, also known as the aging process.
What is cell regeneration?
By cell regeneration, physicians mean the body’s ability to reject irreparable cells and thus heal damaged tissue with the help of newly produced cells. Cell regeneration is the natural process of self-healing, which takes place permanently and mainly during the resting phases in the human body. During sleep, the organism rejects body cells and nerve cells that are beyond repair. Repairable cells are healed at the same time. Every night, several million new body and nerve cells grow for this purpose. In principle, this growth also takes place during the day, but it proceeds up to ten times faster at night. For this reason alone, sleep is vital for humans. The higher speed of regeneration processes during this resting phase is mainly due to the fact that many functions of the body are shut down during the night’s rest and regenerative processes can thus be given full attention. The replacement of dead body cells is also called physiological regeneration, whereby the ratio of newly produced cells and dead cells changes with age. The medical profession distinguishes regeneration processes into one-time, cyclic and permanent processes. For example, a one-time process is the loss of milk teeth and their replacement with adult dentition. A cyclic regeneration process is, for example, the menstrual cycle in women, in which the tissue of the endometrium is shed and replaced by hormonal control. Permanent regeneration, on the other hand, is present in most body cells, such as, in particular, the cells of the skin, the blood, or the tissues of the intestinal lining.
Function and task
Through natural cell regeneration, the body repairs minor damage to organs or parts of the tissue with newly produced cells. Either this regeneration occurs completely or incompletely. For certain types of tissue and organs, there are specialized stem cells that are involved in the permanent generation of new cells. The fact that human tissue is capable of producing new cells at all is related to the cells’ ability to divide. However, the more differentiated the body’s cells are, the less capable the organism is of regenerating. This means that not every type of cell regenerates permanently or at all. Myocardial cells and nerve cells with a high degree of specialization, for example, are not capable of dividing at all. Since such cells are mainly present in the brain and spinal cord, only minor defect healing generally takes place in these two areas of the body. This explains why phenomena such as paraplegia cannot be compensated by the body’s own regeneration processes. In this context, blood cells are very different from the cells of the brain and spinal cord. They are less specialized and can therefore be permanently regenerated. Cells such as the muscle cells of the heart muscle are in turn capable of regeneration during youth, but lose their regenerative capacity with increasing age. Since the differentiation of cells generally becomes finer with age, the regenerative capacity generally decreases with age. Thus, the lifespan of human cells ultimately varies from a few hours to an entire lifetime. Of the body’s estimated up to 90 trillion cells, about 50 million die within a single second and are largely replaced again by division processes. However, since the sum of dead cells does not fully correspond to the quantity of newly produced cells, some cells are still lost every second during this process.Thus, the older a person gets, the greater the overall loss, which explains, for example, the natural aging process.
Diseases and ailments
Many diseases limit the ability of human cells to regenerate. An example of such a disease is diabetes, which particularly interferes with the regeneration of blood vessels. Degenerative diseases such as multiple sclerosis or osteoporosis can also be mentioned in this context. The reason is vitamin D deficiency, which often accompanies the above-mentioned diseases. The human body synthesizes the hormone 1,25-dihydroxycholecalciferol from vitamin D, which supports calcium absorption in the intestine, as well as prevents calcium loss in the bones and influences the regeneration of blood vessels. Ultimately, vitamin D increases the regeneration-activating cells in the blood and in this context is said to have a particular influence on the healing of blood vessels. Since the regeneration processes of blood vessels are limited in diseases such as diabetes, many diabetes patients are now regularly given vitamin D as a countermeasure. Natural signs of aging can also promote complaints in the area of cell regeneration. For example, cell mutations frequently occur in the course of life, which can impede or prevent regeneration processes. In order to be able to repair cell areas that are not capable of regeneration themselves in the future, medicine is currently experimenting with stem cell therapy, as it is currently already being used in the fight against diseases such as leukemia.
