Aging & Longevity

The endurance capacity of the spinal extensor muscles plays a key role in maintaining spinal function. This systematic review and meta-analysis aims to synthesise current evidence on how ageing influences fatigue of the spinal extensor muscles, addressing the inconsistent findings reported across existing studies. Medline, EMBASE, PubMed, Web of Science and CINAHL Plus databases were searched from their inception to 28 June 2025. Cross-sectional studies assessing fatigue of the spinal extensor...

Intrinsic capacity (IC) is a composite that includes five different domains related to a person's capacities: sensory, locomotion, vitality, psychological and cognitive. IC represents part of a global effort to promote healthy ageing, one aspect of which is healthy cognitive functioning. This study aimed to elucidate the association of IC and cognitive decline in older adults. Using data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA, wave 6), IC composite was derived through z-score and...

The field of ageing science has gone through remarkable progress in recent decades, yet many fundamental questions remain unanswered or unexplored. Here we present a curated list of 100 open problems in ageing and longevity science. These questions were collected through community engagement and further analysed using Natural Language Processing to assess their prevalence in the literature and to identify both well-established and emerging research gaps. The final list is categorised into...

CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that WM training can represent a promising approach to sustain older adults’ cognitive functioning and to modulate cortical plasticity, inducing long-lasting left-lateralized activation.

Cellular senescence plays dual roles in precancer lesions: initially serving as a tumor-suppressive barrier within the epithelial compartment and later contributing to a pro-tumoral precancer tissue microenvironment (PreTME) via a sustained, paracrine secretome known as senescent-associated secretory phenotype (SASP). This commentary highlights the role of senescence across various PreTME cell types, explores emerging pharmacologic and lifestyle interception strategies, and outlines current...

Cytosolic translation activity is fine-tuned by environmental conditions primarily through signaling pathways that target translation initiation factors. Although mitochondria possess their own translation machinery, they lack an autonomous signaling network analogous to their cytosolic counterpart for regulating translation activity. Consequently, our understanding of how mitochondrial translation activity is adjusted under different metabolic environments remains very limited. Here, we report...

Aging is a natural, multifactorial biological process characterised by progressive cellular and tissue damage in response to various stressors, leading to functional decline that often affects multiple organs, contributing to the development of age-related diseases. Although life expectancy has increased significantly, age-related conditions have become the leading causes of impairment and disability in the elderly, becoming a major global health concern. This highlights the need for innovative,...

Telomere biology is important for aging and is the cause of the pathogenesis of many neurological disorders, including Alzheimer's disease (AD), Parkinson's disease (PD), multiple sclerosis (MS), stroke, and brain tumors. Telomere shortening is considered to play a role in neurodegeneration, immune senescence, and cerebrovascular dysfunction. Shorter leukocyte telomere length (LTL) is associated with increased risk and severity of stroke, poorer cognitive outcomes in AD, and increased...

Age-related hearing loss (ARHL) has been increasingly implicated as a contributor to cognitive decline, yet the structural neural mechanisms underlying this association remain unclear. This study investigates the relationship between hearing function, measured by pure-tone thresholds (PTT) and words-in-noise (WIN) recognition, and gray matter (GM) volume in auditory and non-auditory brain regions in the left and right cerebral hemispheres. We also examine whether GM volume mediates the...

Mitophagy is crucial for the selective autophagic degradation of damaged mitochondria, helping to maintain both mitochondrial and cellular homeostasis. Here, we report a fluoroalkylated polypyridinium that specifically targets mitochondria and exhibits high activity in mitophagy induction. The polymer effectively restores mitochondrial function and alleviates the inflammatory response in foam cells by activating mitophagy, and displays inherent red fluorescence under physiological conditions,...

Motoric cognitive risk (MCR) syndrome is defined by slow gait speed and cognitive complaints. This study aimed to identify objective gait, cognitive, and psychosocial markers that characterize MCR beyond its traditional criteria. 104 older adults were classified into four groups: healthy aging (n = 50), slow gait speed only (n = 31), cognitive complaints only (n = 13), and MCR (n = 10). Participants completed single- and dual-task gait assessments while wearing wearable gait sensors. The...

The disposable soma theory posits that there is a trade-off between reproduction and somatic maintenance. In support of this theory, we previously identified that pharmacological inhibition of the germline has widespread protective cell non-autonomous effects on cellular protein homeostasis in the model organism Caenorhabditis elegans. However, the cell non-autonomous effects of the germline on mitochondrial protein homeostasis are not well defined. Here, we use pharmacological or genetic...

CONCLUSION: This study provides a comprehensive analysis of the multifactorial determinants of old-age disability in Botswana. The findings underscore the need for integrated, multisectoral strategies that go beyond healthcare access to include educational equity, age-friendly infrastructure, digital inclusion, and gender-sensitive social protection. Policies must address not only individual risk but also household and community conditions that jointly shape disability outcomes. These insights...

CONCLUSIONS: The PFMS intervention is feasible and shows preliminary efficacy in certain aspects during the hospital-to-home transition for older adults with chronic disease. Future research should refine the intervention to better enhance patient participation in medication safety behaviours and self-efficacy.

BACKGROUND: This research was conducted to investigate the association between cognitive function and smartphone ownership among very old adults, a rapidly growing age group. Additionally, we conducted a longitudinal investigation as a sub-analysis to determine whether owning a smartphone affects the level of long-term care certification as a proxy outcome for cognitive decline.

Evolutionary theory of aging predicts that women with increased reproductive effort live shorter lives, but evidence is inconsistent. These inconsistencies could be because environmental conditions influence how much a mother's life span is reduced when having more children, i.e., their life-span cost of reproduction. Using a structural equation measurement model, we compare how reproductive effort affects the life span of 4684 women exposed across different life stages, or not at all, to the...

Dysfunctional alternative splicing events (ASEs) in RNA are markers of aging and Alzheimer's disease (AD). As a key neuronal resilience metabolite, the oxidized nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD^(+)) slows down AD progression in preclinical studies with several clinical trials ongoing. However, the underlying molecular mechanisms around how NAD^(+) enhances neuronal resilience, especially whether it has any effect on ASEs, have remained elusive. This study shows that NAD^(+) augmentation...

Endocytic recycling of transmembrane proteins is essential to cellular function. The intracellular domains of transmembrane proteins are frequently ubiquitylated, a modification that is recognized by adaptor proteins during clathrin-mediated endocytosis. Recent work suggests that transmembrane proteins compete for space within highly crowded endocytic structures, suggesting that enhanced internalization of one group of transmembrane proteins may come at the expense of others. Here, we show that...

Advancing age is accompanied by an accumulation of senescent T cells that secrete pro-inflammatory senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP) molecules. Gut-microbiota-derived signals are increasingly recognised as immunomodulators. In the current study, we demonstrated that ageing and the accumulation of senescent T cells are accompanied by a reduction in microbial-derived short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs). Culturing aged T cells in the presence of butyrate suppresses the induction of a...

Renin-angiotensin system (RAS) activation in heart failure (HF) increases circulating angiotensin II (AII). This increases blood pressure (BP) and promotes adverse ventricular remodeling that makes HF worse. Although human HF increases with age and differs between the sexes, preclinical studies have used young, mostly male animals. We investigated sex differences in AII-induced cardiac remodeling in aging C57BL/6 mice. Mice (≈16 months) were infused with AII (3 mg/kg/day; 6 weeks; osmotic...