Joy Kong, MDRegenerative Medicine Physician, Educator, and Entrepreneur

What Happens to Our Stem Cells as We Age

13 Mar 2025 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:54

A short YouTube talk (by Joy Kong, MD) describing how mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) decline dramatically from birth through the teenage years and how MSCs respond to stress signals by migrating via blood vessels to sites of injury. The speaker states numeric ratios for MSC prevalence: about 1 in 10,000 cells at birth and about 1 in 100,000 by the teenage years. The content emphasizes MSC location near blood vessels and their ability to enter and exit circulation to reach signals of tissue stress.

Questions this video answers

Approximately 1 in 10,000 cells.

Approximately 1 in 100,000 cells.

Chapters

Since you're born, the number of stem cells is going literally off a cliff as far as the ratio of your stem cells and the total number of cells in your body. So just to give you an idea, when you were born, if we're looking at mscs, which is mesenchymal stem cells, what happens is that anywhere you have blood supply, you will have these cells, because these cells are hugging the blood vessels. And if there is a stress signal or some kind of information that triggers the cel, they can squeeze themselves into the blood vessels and swim upstream to find where the signal is the strongest and then squeeze themselves out of the blood vessels to go to work in that area. When you were born, every 1 in 10,000 cells is MSC, mesenchymal stem cell. But by the time you reach your teenage years, it's already one in 100,000.