Aging & Longevity

CONCLUSION: Gait mat and stopwatch measurements showed acceptable agreement, supporting clinical use. However, greater disagreement at faster speeds suggests gait mats may be more appropriate for faster walking speeds. These findings support future investigations of ST and DT gait performance within ARIC and other aging cohorts, including relationships with cognitive decline, mobility limitations, and adverse health outcomes.

INTRODUCTION: Since many hospitalized older adults have delirium, assessment of baseline cognitive function often requires proxy-based measures. While the 16-item Informant Questionnaire on Cognitive Decline in Elderly (IQCODE) specifies cutoff scores for mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and dementia, the 8-item Informant Interview to Differentiate Aging and Dementia (AD8) provides only a single cutoff for "cognitive impairment," limiting its usefulness and precision. Our aim was to develop a...

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Retinal fundus images offer a non-invasive window into systemic aging. Here, we fine-tune a foundation model (RETFound) to predict chronological age from color fundus images in 71,343 participants from the UK Biobank, achieving a mean absolute error of 2.85 years. The resulting retinal age gap, i.e. the difference between predicted and chronological age, is associated with cardiometabolic traits, inflammation, cognitive performance, all-cause mortality, dementia, cancer, and incident...

Epigenetic aging is a hallmark of chronic diseases. While such epigenetic changes can arise following tissue injury, the cell types most affected remain largely unknown. Here we built a cross-species single-cell multiomics atlas of DNA methylation, chromatin accessibility and transcription profiles from healthy, injured (human) and aged (mouse) kidneys. We found that tubular epithelial cells in diseased kidneys exhibit pronounced accelerated epigenetic aging and showed that this pathological...

Aging is accompanied by progressive physiological decline, yet the microbiome determinants that modulate aging remain unclear. Here, we identify Neisseria flavescens (Nf) as an oral commensal associated with decelerated aging in humans. Using AURORA, a generative multi-modality framework, we developed multi-modality aging clocks, performed in silico screening for age-gap-reducing interventions and predicted Nf as a top hit. In silico perturbations linked increased Nf abundance to favorable...

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The "healthy drinking" paradox refers to situations where alcohol consumption is misleadingly associated with better health outcomes, a pattern frequently observed in observational studies that are prone to a range of confounding factors. Some recent studies developing organ-specific proteomic aging clocks report that alcohol consumption is linked to slower aging in select organs, even as it accelerates aging in others, thus echoing this paradox, with substantial discrepancies across such...

Cardiovascular health, depressive symptoms, and cognitive performance are closely interconnected and jointly influence all-cause mortality. We investigated the independent associations of Life's Simple 7 (LS7), depressive symptom trajectories, and cognitive performance with all-cause mortality and conducted exploratory four-way decomposition analyses to evaluate complementary mechanistic hypotheses linking these factors. We analyzed data from the Healthy Aging in Neighborhoods of Diversity...

Perovskite photovoltaics are limited by structural instabilities initiated during crystallization and amplified under operation. We report that a lattice-matched Prussian blue scaffold directs heterogeneous nucleation to produce highly oriented, strain-relaxed films. Its redox-active Fe-C≡N-Fe network mediates the conversion of Pb⁰ and I⁰ defects, and its rigid open framework suppresses A-site cation redistribution and the resulting electronic inhomogeneity under bias. This strategy yielded...

Infant macaques showed immune changes and signs of faster aging years after inhaling smoke.

Fibrotic remodeling of tissues and tumors establishes immunosuppressive microenvironments that drive organ dysfunction and, in cancer, limit response to immunotherapy. Senescent-like cells are conserved drivers of fibrosis and therapeutic targets, yet their functional heterogeneity complicates therapeutic intervention. Here, we show that P-selectin is expressed by a subset of senescent-like cells in fibrotic tissues and tumors. Leveraging fucoidan-based nanoparticles that bind P-selectin, we...

Targeting senescence decreases fibrosis and boosts the response of cancer cells to immunotherapy.

Although cortical thinning and atrophy are well documented in aging and neurodegenerative disease, the cortical structural features associated with preserved or superior cognition across typical adulthood remain incompletely characterized. We examined associations between cortical thickness and cognitive performance in a large, typically aging cohort and tested whether they vary by age and cognitive domain. We analyzed cross-sectional data from cognitively healthy adults in the Human Connectome...

CONCLUSIONS: A machine learning-derived CFI integrating diagnoses, medications, and procedures demonstrated robust prediction of mortality and other adverse outcomes, supporting its incremental value in population-based frailty assessment.

Wearable devices offer the ability to objectively characterize free-living physical activity; however, raw step-count data generated by commercial devices require systematic processing before they can support rigorous inference. We describe a transparent, reproducible standard operating procedure (SOP) for transforming epoch-level step-count data from commercial Garmin devices into participant-level analytic variables and demonstrate its application in the STRRIDE-PD Reunion study: a long-term...

CONCLUSION: Midlife MetS was associated with modest reductions in within-network DMN connectivity, with abdominal obesity and low HDL cholesterol as the primary contributing MetS components. Reduced DMN connectivity was associated with poorer verbal fluency performance. These findings suggest that subtle differences in higher-order functional brain network organization associated with metabolic syndrome can be detected during midlife and are related to cognitive functioning, highlighting the...

β-Nicotinamide mononucleotide (NMN), as the precursor of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD^(+)), has remarkable therapeutic potential in aging-associated diseases. Skeletal muscle exhibits not only reduced mass but also impaired strength and function during aging. However, the protective effects of NMN against skeletal muscle cell senescence remain to be fully elucidated. In this study, we used D-galactose (D-gal) to establish a senescence model in C2C12 cells. Our results demonstrate that...

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are membrane-enclosed nanoparticles that mediate intercellular communication by transferring proteins, nucleic acids, and lipids. Within the hematopoietic system, EVs orchestrate critical signaling between bone marrow (BM) niche cells and hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPCs) to regulate quiescence, proliferation, and lineage commitment. During aging, senescence and telomere attrition drive a profound remodeling of EV biogenesis and cargo. Aged EVs,...

CONCLUSIONS: Although AgeTech standardization is advancing, critical gaps remain. Limited attention to safety, security, privacy, and digital economy and community inclusion raises concerns for trust, equity, and sustainable adoption. Addressing these gaps through targeted and coordinated standardization efforts is essential to support inclusive, trustworthy, and scalable AgeTech solutions in the context of rapid global population aging.