Review|Volume 11, Issue 2|pp 817—832

Can ovarian aging be delayed by pharmacological strategies?

Jinjin Zhang¹, Qian Chen¹, Dingfu Du¹, Tong Wu¹, Jingyi Wen¹, Meng Wu¹, Yan Zhang¹, Wei Yan¹, Su Zhou¹, Yan Li¹, Yan Jin¹, Aiyue Luo¹, Shixuan Wang¹

¹Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Tongji Hospital, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, Hubei, China

Received: November 12, 2018Accepted: January 15, 2019Published: January 23, 2019

https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.101784

Copyright: © 2019 Zhang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Aging has been regarded as a treatable condition, and delaying aging could prevent some diseases. Ovarian aging, a special type of organ senescence, is the earliest-aging organ, as ovaries exhibit an accelerated rate of aging with characteristics of gradual declines in ovarian follicle quantity and quality since birth, compared to other organs. Ovarian aging is considered as the pacemaker of female body aging, which drives the aging of multiple organs of the body. Hence, anti-ovarian aging has become a research topic broadly interesting to both biomedical scientists and pharmaceutical industry. A marked progress has been made in exploration of possible anti-ovarian agents or approaches, such as calorie restriction mimetics, antioxidants, autophagy inducers etc., over the past years. This review is attempted to discuss recent advances in the area of anti-ovarian aging pharmacology and to offer new insights into our better understanding of molecular mechanisms underlying ovarian aging, which might be informative for future prevention and treatment of ovarian aging and its related diseases.