Aging & Longevity

Alzheimer's disease involves a drastic departure from the cognitive, functional, and behavioural trajectory of normal ageing, and is both a dreaded and highly prevalent cause of disability to individuals, and a leading source of health and social care expenditure for society. Before the advent of biomarkers, post-mortem examination was the only method available to establish a definitive diagnosis. In this first paper of the Series, we review state-of-the-art diagnostic practices and the typical...

The United Nations World Population Statistics reported that 10% of the global population, approximately 830 million people, were aged 65 years and older in 2024. This number is projected to double, reaching almost 20% or 1.7 billion, by 2050. With a growing aging population world-wide, age-associated diseases are also expected to increase, which has prompted research into geroscience to optimize the healthspan of aging individuals. For women, menopause significantly increases the risks of...

Programmed Cell Death (PCD) in eukaryotes is a regulated process occurring during development, cell differentiation and aging. Apoptosis is a particularly well studied morphotype of PCD, only observed in animal cells (metazoan). Its most definitive hallmark is the formation and release of membrane-enclosed extracellular vesicles called Apoptotic Bodies (ABs). Although apoptotic-like features have been described in plants, yeast, protozoa and phytoplankton, the production of ABs has been thought...

Age-related increases in cancer have traditionally been attributed to compromised antitumor immunity of exhausted and dysfunctional CD8⁺ T cells. Here we provide an alternative mechanism: in aging, cancer also progresses with the help of fully functional CD8⁺ T cells. These transcriptionally and epigenetically distinct cells (termed double-positive CD8^(+) T cells (DP8)) express CD39, CD73, CD101 and CXCR6 on their surface and accumulate during healthy aging in mice, requiring B cells presenting...

Ageing progressively impairs skeletal muscle regeneration, contributing to reduced mobility and quality of life. While the molecular changes underlying muscle ageing have been well characterised, their impact on muscle stem cell (muSC) behaviour during regeneration remains poorly understood. Here, we leverage telomerase-deficient tert mutant zebrafish larvae as an in vivo model of accelerated ageing to perform real-time analysis of muSC dynamics following muscle injury. We demonstrate that the...

Recent studies have established a reciprocal causal link between aging and the activation of transposable elements, characterized in particular by a de-repression of LINE-1 retrotransposons. These LINE-1 elements represent 21% of the human genome, but only a minority of these sequences retain the coding potential essential for their mobility. LINE-1 encoded proteins can induce cell toxicity implicated in aging and neurodegenerative diseases. However, our knowledge of the expression and...

This study investigated 17α-estradiol's effects on aged hypothalamic physiological activity via long-term administration. Single-nucleus transcriptomic sequencing (snRNA-seq) was performed on pooled hypothalami from each group: aged male Norway brown rats treated with 17α-estradiol (O.T), aged controls (O), and young controls (Y). Supervised clustering of neurons (based on neuropeptides/receptors) evaluated subtype responses to aging and 17α-estradiol. Aging-induced elevation of neuronal...

CONCLUSION: Despite previous research demonstrating that Black and Hispanic MindCrowd participants were more willing to be contacted for future research than White participants, findings from this study suggest hesitancy to consent to online cognitive aging research and genetic testing. A more intentional approach may be necessary to retain MindCrowd participants from underrepresented communities in cognitive research studies.

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The epigenome is sensitive to metabolic inputs and is crucial for aging. Lysosomes act as a signaling hub to sense metabolic cues and regulate longevity. We found that lysosomal metabolic pathways signal through the epigenome to regulate transgenerational longevity in Caenorhabditis elegans. Activation of lysosomal lipid signaling and lysosomal adenosine monophosphate-activated protein kinase (AMPK) or reduction of lysosomal mechanistic target of rapamycin (mTOR) signaling increased the...

An anthropologist confronts aging myths and rejects notions of elder obsolescence.

CONCLUSION: These findings provide preliminary evidence of early empathy-related and theory of mind alterations in MCI, supporting the inclusion of social cognition assessments in standard neuropsychological protocols. The combined use of self-report and task-based instruments may enhance early identification of socio-emotional dysfunctions and inform personalized clinical interventions. The preliminary nature of this study is mainly due to the small sample size and the heterogeneous clinical...

AIMS: This study protocol aims to outline a mixed-methods study of the implementation of the BE-EMPOWERed program in four primary care areas (PCAs) in Flanders. The study assesses implementation processes and outcomes, while exploring its effectiveness on clinical outcomes.

As the only gateway governing nucleocytoplasmic transport, the nuclear pore complex (NPC) maintains fundamental cellular processes and deteriorates with age. However, the study of age-related roles of single NPC components remains challenging owing to the complexity of NPC composition. Here, we demonstrate that the central energy sensor, AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK), post-translationally regulates the abundance of the nucleoporin NPP-16/NUP50 in response to nutrient availability and...

Our previous studies demonstrated that both D-galactose (D-gal)-mediated aging and high-fat diet (HF)-promoted obesity trigger inflammation, impair mitochondrial function in heart and brain, and disrupt bone homeostasis. However, the dental pulp pathologies in aging and obesity remain unclear. Insight into pulp biology under systemic conditions may facilitate strategies for maintaining pulp vitality. This study explored the effects of D-gal-mediated aging and HF-promoted obesity and...

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Ubiquitin is a conserved modifier regulating the stability and function of numerous target proteins. In all eukaryotes, polyubiquitin precursors are generated and processed into ubiquitin monomers. The final ubiquitin unit always contains a C-terminal extension, but its physiological significance is unknown. Here, we show that C-terminally extended ubiquitin, termed CxUb, is essential for stress resistance, mitophagy, and longevity in Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Caenorhabditis elegans. CxUb...

The neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) has emerged as a widely accessible and cost-effective marker of systemic inflammation, derived from routine peripheral blood counts. It has demonstrated clinical relevance across a broad spectrum of conditions, including infections, cardiovascular disease, malignancies, trauma, postoperative complications, and cancer. Aging is associated with a gradual rise in NLR, driven by increasing neutrophil counts and declining lymphocyte numbers, reflecting...

Human development involves multiple signaling pathways acting concertedly in an age- and sex-specific fashion. Trisomy 21, the genetic cause of Down syndrome, dysregulates human development leading to both early neurodevelopmental delays and atypical accelerated aging through unknown mechanisms. Here, we report an integrated multi-omic analysis of the effects of age, sexual dimorphism, and trisomy 21 in hundreds of research participants using matched transcriptome, proteome, metabolome, and...