Aging & Longevity

Normative, longitudinal data are necessary for effective modeling of factors underlying disease processes on the brain. Large scale national and international consortium data have characterized human regional brain volume trajectories as complex and prolonged gray and white matter maturation through the third decade of life followed by progressive senescence of cortical and then subcortical gray matter. By middle age (>40 years), white matter volume is also in decline. Although rodents are the...

The accumulation of senescent cells (SNCs) contributes to tissue dysfunction and age-related diseases, creating an urgent need for effective senolytic strategies. We identified a metabolic vulnerability in SNCs characterized by marked downregulation of asparagine synthetase (ASNS), rendering them uniquely dependent on exogenous asparagine (Asn). This vulnerability was exploited through combined treatment with L-asparaginase (ASNase) and autophagy inhibitors, which synergistically deplete Asn via...

Vascular aging increases the susceptibility to cardio-cerebrovascular conditions, such as atherosclerotic diseases and hypertension, the leading causes of global disability and mortality. Dietary citrate extends the lifespan of Drosophila melanogaster and Caenorhabditis elegans as well as improves the memory of mice injured by a high-fat diet (HFD); whether it alleviates vascular aging and age-related vascular diseases; however, remains unknown. Here, we showed that dietary supplementation of...

Human and murine studies reveal that innate immune cells are able to mount enhanced responses to pathogens after primary inflammatory exposure. Innate immune memory has been shown to last for months to years, longer than the lifespan of most innate immune cells. Indeed, long-lived hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPCs) serve as a cellular reservoir for innate immune memory. In this review, we summarize the evidence that innate immune memory is epigenetically encoded in HSPCs, and we...

BACKGROUND: Our understanding on how cognitive and socioemotional well-being factors interact throughout adulthood has increased remarkably over the past decades, encouraging the use of cognitively engaging leisure activities, such as music, to promote healthy ageing. Choir singing has attracted particular interest in this regard with its established benefits on socioemotional well-being. Outside the clinical context, however, the cognitive and well-being effects induced by musical activities...

CONCLUSIONS: Cognitive frailty is a consistent predictor of cardiometabolic risk across distinct populations, supporting integrated screening and prevention strategies targeting both cognitive and physical deficits in aging populations.

CONCLUSIONS: PMCC activities are associated with cognitive function improvement in middle-aged and elderly adults in China. These findings suggest that engaging in PMCC activities could serve as a potential protective factor for enhancing cognitive health in this population, providing a basis for incorporating PMCC into strategies aimed at promoting cognitive well-being and healthy aging.

Effective communication between the brain and peripheral tissues is crucial for homeostasis and health, and its impairment is a defining feature of aging. Circumventricular organs, characterized by the presence of fenestrated capillaries and absence of a blood-brain barrier (BBB), play a crucial role in controlling substance exchange between the brain and the blood. To date, adaptive changes in fenestrated vasculature in response to environmental insults remain poorly understood. In this study,...

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Several strategies have emerged lately in response to the rapid increase in the aging population to enhance health and life span and manage aging challenges. Developing such strategies is imperative and requires an assessment of biological aging. Several aging clocks have recently been developed to measure biological aging and to assess the efficacy of longevity interventions. Biological age better reflects a person's actual age and is closely associated with health outcomes and time to...

In a multicellular organism, cell lineages share a common evolutionary history. Knowing this history can facilitate the study of development, aging, and cancer. Cell lineage trees represent the evolutionary history of cells sampled from an organism. Recent developments in single-cell sequencing have greatly facilitated the inference of cell lineage trees. However, single-cell data are sparse and noisy, and the size of single-cell data is increasing rapidly. Accurate inference of cell lineage...

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Over time, cells in the brain and in the body accumulate damage, which contributes to the ageing process¹. In the human brain, the prefrontal cortex undergoes age-related changes that can affect cognitive functioning later in life². Here, using single-nucleus RNA sequencing (snRNA-seq), single-cell whole-genome sequencing (scWGS) and spatial transcriptomics, we identify gene-expression and genomic changes in the human prefrontal cortex across lifespan, from infancy to centenarian. snRNA-seq...

Late-life depression (LLD) arises from the confluence of neurochemical dysfunction, oxidative stress, and neural network disintegration, presenting a formidable therapeutic challenge. Here, we demonstrated that combined vitamin D (Vit D) and L-theanine (L-thea) administration exerts multimodal neurorestorative effects in an aged murine model of unpredictable chronic mild stress (UCMS), addressing the core triad of LLD pathology: dopaminergic decline, redox imbalance, and thalamocortical...

We aimed to assess the validity of predicted repetitions in reserve (RIR) during resistance exercise (RE) in community-dwelling older adults (n = 25; 68 ± 4 yrs.; body mass index [BMI] = 28.1 ± 4.6 kg·m^(-2)). Prior to data collection, participants were familiarized with resistance training as well as with the use of RIR and rating of perceived exertion (RPE). Participants completed a one-repetition maximum (1RM) test in the chest press exercise. The repetitions-to-failure test, used to...

Differential expression analysis is crucial in genomics, yet most methods focus only on mean shifts. Variance shifts in gene expression-especially in cellular signaling and aging-are increasingly recognized as being biologically important. We present QRscore (quantile rank score), a general non-parametric framework that extends the Mann-Whitney test to detect both mean and variance shifts through model-informed weights derived from negative binomial (NB) and zero-inflated NB (ZINB)...

Nuclease-helicase DNA2 is a multifunctional genome caretaker that is essential for cell proliferation in a range of organisms, from yeast to human^(1-4). Bi-allelic DNA2 mutations that reduce DNA2 concentrations cause a spectrum of primordial dwarfism disorders, including Seckel and Rothmund-Thomson-related syndromes^(5-7). By contrast, cancer cells frequently express high concentrations of DNA2 (refs. ^(8-11)). The mechanism that precludes cell proliferation in the absence of DNA2 and the...

Aging is a major risk factor for neurodegenerative diseases associated with protein aggregation, including Huntington's disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Although these diseases involve different aggregation-prone proteins, their common late onset suggests a link to converging changes resulting from aging. In this study, we found that age-associated hyperactivation of EPS8/RAC signaling in Caenorhabditis elegans promotes the pathological aggregation of Huntington's disease-related...

While research suggests that playing musical instruments promotes neuroplasticity in professional musicians, it remains unclear whether lifelong music experience benefits brain health in non-professional musicians. This study examined whether playing a musical instrument across the lifespan is associated with (a) altered grey matter (GM) density and (b) neuropsychological functioning in older adults at risk for dementia. Sixty-one individuals aged ≥ 50 years were recruited from a memory clinic....