Aging & Longevity

The discovery of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance and the unraveling of its molecular mechanisms are currently solving previously puzzling challenges that Mendelian genetics based solely on DNA could not explain, leading to significant paradigm shifts across various fields of biology. There has been a long-standing controversy over the factors determining the caste fate of individuals in social insects. Increasing evidence supports heritable influences on division of labor. Here, we...

Alterations in energy metabolism may drive fatigue in older age, but prior research primarily focused on skeletal muscle energetics without assessing other systems and utilized self-reported measures of fatigue. We tested the association between energy metabolism in the brain and an objective measure of fatigability in the Study of Muscle, Mobility and Aging (N = 119, age 76.8 ± 4.0 years, 59.7% women). Total brain cerebral metabolic rate of oxygen (CMRO(2)) was measured using arterial spin...

Effective memory formation declines in human aging. Diminished neural selectivity-reduced differential responses to preferred versus nonpreferred stimuli-may contribute to memory decline, but its drivers remain unclear. We investigated the effects of top-down attention and preclinical Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathology on neural selectivity in 166 cognitively unimpaired older participants using functional magnetic resonance imaging during a word-face/word-place associative memory task. During...

Microglia, the resident immune cells of the brain, are now recognized as being active participants in the onset and progression of many neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders. As a result, substantial effort has been made in finding ways to target, deplete or modulate the aberrant phenotypes of the microglia that are present in these different disease states, albeit with varied levels of success. The gut microbiota has recently emerged as a master regulator of microglia throughout the...

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Presbycusis, one of the most widespread disorders, is in part associated with the loss of temporal precision within the central auditory system. A contributor to the dysfunctional temporal precision during aging is the substantial downregulation of GABA in the central inferior colliculus (ICc), the hub of ascending and descending inputs of the auditory midbrain. However, how GABAergic inputs across the tonotopic axis of the ICc change with age has not been well explored. We sought to determine...

Ageing is the most important risk factor for many common human diseases, including cancer, diabetes, neurodegeneration and cardiovascular disease. Consequently, combating ageing itself has emerged as a rational strategy for addressing age-related multimorbidity. Over the past three decades, multiple genetic and pharmacologic interventions have led to substantial extension of lifespan and healthspan in model organisms. However, it is unclear whether these interventions target the causal...

The blood-brain barrier (BBB) restricts the passage of protein-rich fluids through tight junctions (TJs) formed between brain endothelial cells (BECs). BBB restrictiveness diminishes with aging, but the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. BECs establish physical contact with pericytes via N-cadherin homophilic adhesion. In cortex tissue from young and middle-aged patients, the age-related loss of vascular N-cadherin corresponds with the disruption of occludin TJs. Genetic deletion of...

Cancer therapy is limited by resistance to standard-of-care chemotherapeutic and/or by treatment-associated toxicity. Identifying molecular mechanisms that modulate cellular toxicity is crucial for enhancing treatment efficacy. We characterize CDADC1, a vertebrate-specific orphan enzyme, as an unprecedented eukaryotic dCTP deaminase. CDADC1 catalyzes the conversion of dCTP into dUTP. While bacteria use this activity to sustain proliferation, CDADC1 evolved independently and is not required for...

Skeletal muscle is a primary tissue of dysfunction during both aging and obesity. Recently, the coincidence of obesity and aging has gained attention due to the intersection of the obesity epidemic with an aging demographic. Both aging and obesity are associated with marked defects in skeletal muscle metabolic health. Despite these findings, we have a poor understanding of how obesity and aging may interact to impact skeletal muscle mass and metabolic health. Therefore, we investigated the...

The process of ageing is extremely variable in progression and phenotypic features including significant variations in disease milestones, such as cognitive impairment, frailty, or recurrent falls. Our aim was to analyze the influence of lifestyle factors on motor and cognitive performance in a longitudinal ageing study in older people on healthy ageing. We conducted a longitudinal analysis in a cohort of 744 older participants (mean 70 years) over an 8-year period. Cognitive performance was...

Adult neural stem cells exist on a continuum from deep to shallow quiescence that changes in response to injury or aging; however, the transcription factors controlling these stepwise transitions have not been identified. Single-cell transcriptomic analyses of mice with loss of function or increased levels of the essential activation factor Ascl1 reveal that Ascl1 promotes the activation of hippocampal neural stem cells by driving these cells out of deep quiescence, despite its low protein...

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is highly associated with aging, typically presenting with amnestic, multi-domain cognitive impairment and greater medial temporal lobe (MTL) atrophy relative to cortex. However, approximately 15 % of AD cases present atypically, often at younger ages and with greater cortical involvement relative to MTL. This association between age and AD presentation is imperfect: some younger-onset cases are typical, amnestic presentations while some older-onset cases present less...

Alzheimer's disease (AD) and hearing loss (HL) are major age-related public health challenges with emerging evidence suggesting their interconnection. This study aimed to investigate global research trends, shared molecular mechanisms, and clinical implications of AD and HL. A total of 349 articles published between 2004 and 2024 were retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection and analyzed using VOSviewer and CiteSpace. GeneCards and STRING databases were used to explore molecular targets...

Aging is characterized by a gradual decline of cellular and physiological functions over time and an increased risk of different diseases. RNA therapeutics constitute an emerging approach to target the molecular mechanisms of aging and age-related diseases via rational design and have several advantages over traditional drug therapies, including high specificity, low toxicity and the potential for rapid development and production. Here, we discuss the latest developments in RNA therapeutics...

Epigenetic aging measures are novel molecular indicators of biological aging that predict age-related chronic disease. We examined whether several established indices of epigenetic aging mediated the association between life course socioeconomic status (SES) and decrements in kidney function across a decade. Biomarker data were from 252 non-Hispanic (NH) Black and white participants who had consented to genetic analyses in Wave 2 (2004-2009) and 3 (2014-2021) of the Midlife in the United States...

Why people age at different rates is a fundamental, unsolved problem in biology. We created a model that predicts an individual's age from physiological traits that change with age in the large UK Biobank dataset, such as blood pressure, lung function, strength, and stimulus-reaction time. The model predicted a person's age with best accuracy when it heavily weighted traits that together query multiple organ systems, arguing that most or all physiological systems (lung, heart, brain, etc.)...

Mutation, deletion, or silencing of genes encoding cellular metabolism factors occurs frequently in human malignancies. Neomorphic mutations in isocitrate dehydrogenases 1 and 2 (IDH1/2) promoting the production of R-2-hydroxyglutarate (R-2HG) instead of α-ketoglutarate (αKG) are recurrent in human brain cancers and constitute an early event in low-grade gliomagenesis. Due to its structural similarity with αKG, R-2HG acts as an inhibitor of αKG-dependent enzymes. These include the JUMONJI family...

Here, we investigated whether educational attainment influences the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying vigilance regulation, as reflected in resting-state eyes-closed electroencephalographic (rsEEG) rhythms, in patients with dementia due to Parkinson's (PDD) and Lewy body disease (DLB). Clinical, demographic, and rsEEG data were obtained from an international database, including PDD patients (N = 75), DLB patients (N = 50), and cognitively unimpaired older controls (Healthy; N = 54). Each...

The limited doubling capacity of human cells, known as replicative senescence or cellular senescence, is a major factor in cellular aging. This process is triggered by telomere erosion, which activates a p53-mediated DNA damage response (DDR) that halts cell proliferation. p53, a transcriptional regulator, responds to DNA damage by increasing the expression of the cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor p21. p21 then arrests cells at specific stages of the cell cycle. Additionally, p53 upregulates...