Cell regeneration

Under the Cell regeneration or Cell regeneration the physician understands the body's own 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 take place either once, cyclically or permanently, whereby, for example, the cells of the skin and the liver are subject to permanent cell generation, while highly specialized cells such as those of the brain do not divide and therefore do not Are capable of regeneration.

With age, the ability to regenerate decreases, whereby in the course of life the permanent cell exchange increases and decreases, which is also known as the aging process.

What is cell regeneration?

The doctor understands cell regeneration as the body's own 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 that takes place permanently and especially during rest phases in the human body. During sleep, the organism rejects body cells and nerve cells that can no longer be repaired. Repairable cells are healed at the same time.

For this purpose, several million new body and nerve cells grow every night. In principle, this growth also takes place during the day, but is up to ten times as fast at night. For this reason alone, sleep is vital for humans.

The higher speed of regeneration processes during this rest phase is mainly due to the fact that many functions of the body are shut down during the night and regenerative processes can be given full attention.

The replacement of dead body cells is also known as physiological regeneration, whereby the ratio of newly produced cells and dead cells changes with age. The physician differentiates the regeneration processes into one-off, cyclical and permanent processes.

A one-off process is, for example, the loss of milk teeth and their replacement with adult teeth. A cyclical regeneration process in women is the menstrual cycle, in which the tissue of the uterine lining is rejected and replaced by hormonal control. In contrast, permanent regeneration occurs in most body cells, especially in the cells of the skin, in the blood or in the tissue of the intestinal lining.

Function & task

Through the natural cell regeneration, the body repairs minor damage to organs or parts of the tissue with newly produced cells. This regeneration either takes place 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 able to produce new cells is related to the ability of the cells to divide. However, the more differentiated the body's cells, the less regenerative the organism is. This means that not every cell type regenerates permanently or at all.

For example, myocardial cells and nerve cells with a high degree of specialization are not capable of dividing at all. Since such cells are mainly found in the brain and spinal cord, there is generally less defect healing in these two areas of the body. This explains why phenomena such as paraplegia cannot be compensated for by the body's own regeneration processes.

In this context, blood cells are very different from cells in the brain and spinal cord. They are less specialized and can therefore be constantly re-created. Cells such as the muscle cells of the heart muscle are again capable of regeneration during youth, but lose their ability to regenerate with increasing age.

Since the differentiation of cells generally becomes finer with increasing age, the ability to regenerate generally decreases with age. The lifespan of human cells ultimately varies between a few hours and a lifetime.

Of the estimated up to 90 trillion cells in the body, around 50 million die within a single second and are largely replaced by division processes. Since the total number of dead cells does not completely match the number of newly produced cells, some cells are still lost every second in this process. The older a person gets, the greater the total loss, which explains the natural aging process, for example.

Illnesses & ailments

Many diseases limit the ability of human cells to regenerate. An example of such a disease is diabetes, which particularly disturbs the regeneration of blood vessels.

Degenerative diseases such as multiple sclerosis or osteoporosis can also be mentioned in this context. The reason is a vitamin D deficiency, which is often associated with the diseases mentioned. The human body synthesizes the hormone 1,25-dihydroxycholecalciferol from vitamin D, which supports the absorption of calcium in the intestine, 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 particularly intended to have an influence on the healing of blood vessels.

Since the regeneration processes of blood vessels in diseases such as diabetes are restricted, many diabetes patients are now regularly given vitamin D as a countermeasure.

Natural signs of age can also promote complaints in the area of ​​cell regeneration. For example, cell mutations often occur in the course of life, which can make regeneration processes more difficult or prevent them.

In order to be able to repair cell areas in the future that are not able to regenerate themselves, medicine is currently experimenting with stem cell therapy, as it is currently used in the fight against diseases such as leukemia.