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Longevity, Aging and Cancer: Thermodynamics and Complexity
Version 1
: Received: 15 May 2022 / Approved: 17 May 2022 / Online: 17 May 2022 (03:16:18 CEST)
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Nieto-Villar, J.M.; Mansilla, R. Longevity, Aging and Cancer: Thermodynamics and Complexity. Foundations 2022, 2, 664-680. Nieto-Villar, J.M.; Mansilla, R. Longevity, Aging and Cancer: Thermodynamics and Complexity. Foundations 2022, 2, 664-680.
Abstract
From the formalism of the thermodynamics of irreversible processes and the theory of complex systems, characterization of longevity and aging and its relationship with the emergence and evolution of cancer was carried out. It was found that: 1. The rate of entropy production can be used as an index of robustness, plasticity, the aggressiveness of cancer, and as a measure of biological age; 2. The aging process, as well as the evolution of cancer, goes through what we have called “biological phase transition”; 3. The process of metastasis, which occurs through epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT), appears as a phase transition far from thermodynamic equilibrium and exhibits Shilnikov chaos-like dynamic behavior. This dynamic guarantees the robustness of the process and, in turn, its unpredictability; 4. It was shown that as the ferroptosis process is strengthened, the complexity of the dynamics associated with the emergence and evolution of cancer decreases. The theoretical framework developed contributes to a better understanding of the biophysical-chemical phenomena of longevity and aging and their relationship with cancer.
Keywords
longevity; aging; cancer; complex systems; non-equilibrium thermodynamics; biological phase transition; ferroptosis
Subject
Biology and Life Sciences, Cell and Developmental Biology
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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