Aging & Longevity

Older age combined with chronic disease increases the risk of malnutrition and frailty, impacting disease recovery and overall clinical outcomes. Serum concentrations of several trace elements and their respective biomarkers have not yet been investigated with regard to frailty in older adults with disease, although these patients most likely have an altered trace element profile owing to both inflammatory conditions and inadequate dietary intake. This cross-sectional study investigated trace...

Haematopoiesis has long been a paradigm for understanding how human genetic variation can influence physiology in health and disease, ranging from the genetic characterization of Mendelian blood diseases to population-scale genomic studies of blood cell phenotypes and diseases. More recently, advances in single-cell genomics and variant-to-function mapping are enabling mechanistic insights into how genetic variation shapes blood cell development. Alongside inherited variation, the...

How minute pathogenic signals trigger decisive immune responses is a fundamental question in biology. Classical signaling often relies on ATP-driven enzymatic cascades, but innate immunity frequently employs death fold domain (DFD) self-assembly. The energetic basis of this assembly is unknown. Here, we show that specific DFDs function as energy reservoirs through metastable supersaturation. Characterizing all 109 human DFDs, we identified sequence-encoded nucleation barriers specifically in the...

Age-related cellular changes negatively impact CD4^(+) T cell function. Our prior work showed that mitochondrial complex II (succinate dehydrogenase [SDH]) expression was upregulated in T cells from older (O) adults (60-80 years old). T cells from older adults also produced higher amounts of cytokines generally considered proinflammatory, such as Th17 cytokines IL-17A/F and IL-21, and the Th-17-supportive cytokine IL-6, compared to T cells from younger (Y) adults (25-40 years old). The objective...

No abstract

The question of whether aging should be classified as a disease has gained prominence in geroscience, fueled by advances in molecular biology and the aspiration to develop interventions that mitigate age-associated functional decline. However, evolutionary models describe aging as an emergent consequence of declining selection gradients and life-history trade-offs rather than as a deviation from species-typical function. Comparative data across taxa reveal substantial heterogeneity in aging...

Postural control is expressed as intermittent organization of center-of-pressure (CoP) motion on a saddle-shaped manifold typically aligned with the anteroposterior (AP) and mediolateral (ML) axes. When task demands reorient postural focus, this saddle rotates away from the AP-ML alignment yet preserves orthogonal axes that indicate directions of greatest and least fractal temporal correlations in sway. Preserved orthogonality appears to reflect a balance between endogenous fractal fluctuations...

The identification of functional ligand-membrane protein interactions under native conditions remains a major challenge in cancer biology. Using cell-systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment, we identified a high-affinity DNA aptamer, CW06, against breast cancer cells. To precisely identify its native membrane target, we developed Aptamer-mediated Metabolic Glycan-labeling Proximity Hybridization (Apt-MGPH), which revealed the mitochondrial solute carrier SLC25A24 as the...

Through alternative splicing, the TP53 gene can generate multiple protein isoforms with distinct biochemical properties. The p53psi isoform has been identified as a shorter variant than full-length p53 as it lacks nuclear localization, oligomerization, and part of the DNA binding domains due to the use of an alternative 3' splice site in intron 6. Several TP53-truncating mutations, including those producing p53psi, have been detected in a significant proportion of human tumors. However, the...

CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: Despite methodological variation, community-based programs that reduce loneliness, social isolation, and support aging in place consistently generate positive SROI ratios, benefiting participants, families, and volunteers while reducing health care use. Collaboration among researchers, communities, and policymakers is essential to translate findings into community actions that enable older adults to age in place.

CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: Stable health trajectories are strongly linked to better cognitive outcomes, whereas sharp health declines predict poorer cognition. Our findings highlight the interconnected biological and behavioral pathways through which health changes may accelerate or mitigate cognitive deterioration, offering insights for targeted interventions and holistic care for persons with cognitive impairment.

DNA replication stress responses are guardians of genomic stability critical during development, hematopoiesis, cancer therapy response, aging and disease suppression. Central to these responses are reversed forks (RF), which are distinct four-way DNA structures formed during DNA replication stalling to protect against toxic DNA lesions. Historically, RF detection relies on specialized electron microscopy, precluding studies within their native cellular context. By harnessing intrinsic...

CONCLUSIONS: We propose that aging affects RFT performance through two dissociable mechanisms. A general decline in multisensory integration increases overall errors symmetrically across tilt angles. The clockwise-specific asymmetry, by contrast, may reflect age-related changes in lateralized visuospatial attention-specifically, the well-documented rightward attentional shift that accompanies healthy aging-which differentially affects the weighting of visual cues for clockwise vs....

Cognitive impairment associated with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is more prevalent and severe in the elderly, possibly due to age-related increases in neuronal susceptibility to intermittent hypoxia (IH). As telomere dysfunction is a key driver of cellular aging, this study aimed to characterize the interaction between telomere dysfunction and IH, and to explore the associated molecular alterations. Using telomere-damaged PC12 cells and G3 Tert^(-/-) progeria mice exposed to IH, we assessed...

OBJECTIVE: Cerebral microbleeds (CMBs) are small vascular lesions detectable on MRI and are associated with increased stroke risk and cognitive decline. However, imaging-based diagnosis is limited by cost and accessibility. This study aimed to identify serum protein biomarkers for early CMB diagnosis and to elucidate molecular mechanisms underlying CMB subtypes.

Cognitive aging is a highly heterogeneous process, with some individuals preserving stable cognitive performance across the lifespan while others exhibiting pronounced decline. This marked interindividual variability indicates that chronological age alone is a poor predictor of cognitive health. Rather than reflecting uniform degeneration, cognitive aging emerges from divergent biological trajectories spanning molecular, cellular, and network levels. In this review, we synthesize emerging...

Macrophages serve as major defenders against pathogens, playing a crucial role in the initiation and modulation of immune responses. Age-related decline in macrophage functions is attributed to a complex network of cellular senescence and immunosenescence. The onset of cellular senescence is often a consequence of sustained oxidative stress, which is worsened by immunosenescence. Green tea catechin, epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG), has emerged as a promising candidate for promoting healthy aging...

Engineering red blood cells (RBCs) has been widely explored for drug delivery, imaging, vaccination, and other applications. However, effective strategies to directly engineer RBCs in vivo are still lacking. Here, we report successful metabolic glycan labeling of RBCs in vivo. We demonstrate that systemically administered azido-sugars can metabolically label circulating RBCs with azido groups, through labeling of both mature RBCs and RBC precursor cells. The surface azido tags on RBCs can...

Cognitive reserve (CR) and brain maintenance (BM) reflect better than expected cognition despite brain pathology and minimal age-related brain changes that explain stable cognition, respectively. Despite being commonly used, joint quantification of these concepts has been limited; our aim is to derive longitudinal CR and BM measures and investigate CR's relationship with education and functional connectivity. We analyzed longitudinal data from 451 participants (241 female, age(mean) = 68.5...

Life expectancy (LE) at birth has increased in many countries throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Future LE values are estimated by extrapolating existing data. However, it remains difficult to determine the LE limit using mathematical models such as the Kannisto model and the Gompertz function due to significant random fluctuations in centenarian mortality rates. There are 12 biological hallmarks of ageing, including epigenetic changes and senescent cells. These microscopic...