Age-associated changes in human hematopoietic stem cells

Aging has a broad impact on the function of the human hematopoietic system. This review will focus primarily on the effect of aging on the human hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) population. With age, even though human HSCs increase in number, they have decreased self-renewal capacity and reconstitution potential upon transplantation. As a population, human HSCs become more myeloid-biased in their differentiation potential. This is likely due to the human HSC population becoming more clonal with age, selecting for myeloid-biased HSC clones. The HSC clones that come to predominate with age may also contain disease-causing genetic and epigenetic changes that confer an increased risk of developing into an age-associated clonal hematopoietic disease, such as myelodysplastic syndrome, myeloproliferative disorders, or leukemia. The selection of these aged human HSC clones may be in part due to changes in the aging bone marrow microenvironment. While there have been significant advances in the understanding of the effect of aging on mouse hematopoiesis and mouse HSCs, we have comparatively less detailed analyses of the effect of aging on human HSCs. Continued evaluation of human HSCs in the context of aging will be important to determine how applicable the findings in mice and other model organisms are to the human clinical setting.