Aging & Longevity

The aging process is predominantly influenced by genetic and environmental factors. Environmental factors that accelerate biological aging, known as gerontogens, increase organismal vulnerability and susceptibility to disease, thereby elevating the risks of multiple aging-related disease onset and mortality. However, there is a notable deficiency in effective biomarkers for predicting aging-related phenotypes accelerated by gerontogens. Melatonin and cortisol serve as markers of the circadian...

The growing ageing population presents significant challenges for healthcare systems, particularly in monitoring age-related physiological decline. Ageing is a complex, multifactorial process that manifests without specific symptoms and is shaped by lifestyle, environmental exposures, diet, and underlying health conditions. Identifying reliable biomarkers of ageing could enable early interventions, improve prognostic accuracy, and reduce healthcare burdens. One promising avenue is exhaled breath...

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Although interest in biomarkers of biological aging is growing, consensus on reliable, non-invasive indicators remains limited. Endotrophin, a bioactive fragment released during collagen type VI formation, reflects fibroblast activation and extracellular matrix remodeling and has been linked to chronic diseases, metabolic dysfunction, and inflammation. Whether circulating endotrophin also captures aging-related phenotypes and mortality risk in older adults remains unclear. We quantified serum...

Parkinson's disease (PD) shows substantial variability in presentation and progression. Frailty, a multidimensional construct reflecting biological aging, is a determinant of clinical outcomes in several neurodegenerative disorders. While cross-sectional studies suggest that frailty modulates the clinical phenotype of PD, affecting motor and non-motor symptoms, its longitudinal prognostic relevance remains unclear. In this 3-year, single-center cohort study, we investigated whether frailty,...

CONCLUSION: ALI may provide a quantitative measure of cumulative physiological stress burden and appears to be independently associated with cognitive impairment in populations at high risk for stroke. The waist-to-height ratio was identified as a particularly informative component of ALI. These findings suggest the potential utility of integrating ALI into risk assessment frameworks for early identification and prevention of stroke-related cognitive impairment.

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Normative models are increasingly used to characterize individual-level brain deviations in neuroimaging studies, but their performance depends heavily on the reference sample used for training or adaptation. In this study, we systematically investigated how sample size and covariate composition of the reference cohort influence model fit, deviation estimates, and clinical readouts in Alzheimer's disease (AD). Using a discovery dataset (OASIS-3, n = 1032), we trained models on healthy control...

RNA polymerase I (Pol I) is a specialized eukaryotic enzyme responsible for transcribing ribosomal DNA into precursor rRNA, a process that initiates ribosome biogenesis and supports cellular growth, metabolism, and proliferation. Recent structural and mechanistic studies have revealed unique features of Pol I architecture that enable high transcriptional output and tight regulatory control. Pol I activity is dynamically regulated by signaling pathways, epigenetic mechanisms, and chromatin...

Falls in older adults result from declines in muscle quality. This study aimed to examine differences in load-velocity profile (LVP) metrics, muscle ultrasound measures, strength, functional tests, and lifestyle between older adults with and without falls, and to analyze their association with sit-to-stand power. Sixty-two older adults (41 non-fallers, 21 fallers; mean age 68.32 ± 5.07 years) underwent three lab sessions. LVP was determined via functional electromechanical dynamometry during a...

Sleep disturbances and Alzheimer's disease (AD) are interconnected public health challenges. However, the underlying mechanisms of their complex relationships remain elusive. Here, we propose a hypothetical integrative, stream-like model outlining how external and internal exposome factors accelerate brain aging, thereby exacerbating circadian dysregulation, orexin-mediated hyperexcitability, metabolic imbalance, and inflammaging. These changes can lead to increased sleep fragmentation and...

Sjögren's disease, an autoimmune disorder characterized by the presence of circulating autoantibodies and lymphocytic infiltrates in salivary glands, predominantly affects women later in life. By leveraging genetically heterogeneous UM-HET3 mice, this study tested the hypothesis that female sex and aging interact to shape susceptibility to autoimmunity and salivary gland inflammation. Female and male UM-HET3 mice were evaluated across the adult lifespan for the development of glandular...

CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: The high prevalence and cross-country differences highlight the complexity of multimorbidity among adults aged 50 years and older in Europe and Israel. The findings reinforce the influence of demographic, clinical, and lifestyle factors and emphasize the need for public policies promoting healthy aging and integrated health care.

Entropy may play an underappreciated role in human aging, such as in skeletal muscle functional declines. Histologically, muscle appears increasingly disorganized with aging, with greater fiber size variability and fiber-type grouping. We tested the hypothesis that entropy is associated with reduced physical performance and muscle function, independent of muscle mass. We quantified a homeostatic dysregulation index of muscle (HDI(M)) as a proxy for entropy of muscle fiber disorganization based...

Clonal haematopoiesis (CH) is the presence of acquired mutations in blood cells and is a consequence of ageing that is linked to malignancy, cardiovascular disease and other diseases of ageing. CH is a reflection of genomic instability with ageing; however, there is evidence that CH may exacerbate features of normal ageing, including inflammageing and immunosenescence, and more directly contribute to disease causation. CH can manifest as mosaic loss of X or Y, autosomal mosaic chromosomal...

Ageing is associated with a loss of skeletal muscle mass, strength and function, termed sarcopenia. The presence of sarcopenia is known to be problematic leading to an increased risk of falls, fractures and mortality. Age-related changes in the gut microbiome, characterized by reduced diversity and altered metabolite production, may compromise intestinal barrier function, leading to increased permeability. These age-associated changes in the gut microbiome led to changes in circulating microbial...

Aqueous Zn | |I(2) batteries, involving I^(-)/I⁰/I^(+) redox, are promising yet usually facing low I(2) utilization dominated by I⁰/I^(+) redox, especially under high loadings. Unlocking alternative pathway to I⁰/I^(+) redox, preferably in noncorrosive dilute electrolytes, is a crucial solution. Here, we report a pathway towards more thermodynamically favorable I⁰/I^(+) redox, via a unique carbon-halogen bond substitution. This pathway is realized with a low-concentrated (0.7 M), noncorrosive...

Although aging is a universal event, some individuals are able to achieve extreme longevity. The Long-Life Family Study (LLFS) enrolls participants from families enriched with long-lived individuals, serves as a valuable dataset for studying ageing phenotypes and identify potential intervention targets. We analyzed the association between age at blood draw and 16,284 RNAseq-based blood transcriptomic data from 2,167 LLFS participants with ages ranging from 18 to 107, replicated the results in...

Changes in human survival and mortality patterns resulting in life expectancy (LE) increase are profoundly significant for society and critically depend on societal factors but cannot escape frames defined by biology. Demography, a social discipline, uses descriptive terms, such as survival curve rectangularization, mortality compression, lifespan disparity reduction, and mean (modal, median) lifespan increase, to define the beneficial changes thought possible due to deceleration of aging. The...

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