As you get older, your body gets weirder, malfunctioning in some awfully creative, uniquely torturous ways, like how those with a prostate will have to wake up a few times a night to dribble out an obnoxiously small amount of pee. This is because the prostate commonly enlarges in men as they age, though why it does so when cancer isn’t involved has been a little bit of a mystery.
A research team from Johns Hopkins University, publishing their findings in the Journal of Pathology, may have found an answer.
Doctors knew that benign prostatic hyperplasia starts in one specific part of the organ: the transition area around the urethra. Why that tiny ring of tissue suddenly started pumping out extra cells out of nowhere while the rest of the gland kept on doing its thing wasn’t well understood.
By running single-cell RNA sequencing on around 130,000 individual prostate cells, the researchers discovered a brand-new subtype of basal epithelial cells called WIF1+ (which, written out, looks like an improved form of Wi-Fi), and it’s that cell that might be why you have to bleary-eyed shuffle to the bathroom at one, three, and five in the morning.
Your Prostate’s WIF1+ Cells Are Betraying You
The prostate is broken up into several distinct areas, but these WIF1+ cells are holed up almost exclusively in the transition zone. Tissue samples taken from men with enlarged prostates showed a huge surge in these cells, promoting tissue growth and cellular remodeling that puts your urethra in a chokehold, thus explaining why only a little bit of pee comes out at a time.
As obnoxious as that sounds, that might be why the transition zone rarely gets hit with prostate cancer, as these cells might actively dampen local inflammation and tweak specific growth signaling pathways.
There’s some more research to be done to prove direct causation, but if this finding proves true, it will go a long way in identifying a clear target for future drug therapies, thus giving a glimmer of hope to men who just want to sleep without having to drain a leaky hose a few times a night.
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