Aging & Longevity

People tend to form impressions of others' trustworthiness based on their facial appearance and make trust-related decisions accordingly. In such face-based trustworthiness judgments (FBTJs), older adults are generally more likely than younger adults to attribute higher trustworthiness. This pattern is sometimes referred to as positivity bias and has been proposed as a potential risk factor for fraud victimization in later life. However, previous studies lack objective ground-truth measures of...

CONCLUSIONS: Relative muscle power showed superior predictive performance for self-reported walking difficulty, as an indicator of mobility limitation, compared to other normalization methods. Future longitudinal studies are needed to confirm these findings and explore their relevance for other clinically meaningful outcomes.

This letter provides a critical reflection on the article "Sex- and age-related declines in muscle mass, strength, physical performance, and muscle quality among community-dwelling older adults: A cross-sectional study" (Asano et al., 2025). The study significantly advances our understanding of age-related muscle deterioration by examining multiple domains, including muscle mass, strength, physical performance, and quality, in a large cohort of Japanese older adults. Key findings highlight that...

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...