Aging & Longevity

Escitalopram is one of the most widely prescribed selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) for treating depression and anxiety disorders in adolescents and pregnant women. While some SSRIs have been reported to extend lifespan, the impact of escitalopram on the aging process remains unclear. Here, we demonstrated that escitalopram administration at juvenile, young, or old adult stages significantly shortens lifespan and impairs healthspan in Caenorhabditis elegans. This pro-aging...

Individuals with hypoplastic left heart syndrome (HLHS) have an underdeveloped left ventricle and require surgery to reconfigure blood flow for survival. Here we profiled the HLHS right-ventricular microenvironment by single-nucleus RNA sequencing and spatial transcriptomics at birth (before heart failure), after surgery with heart failure and after ventricular assist device (VAD) unloading (reduced hypoxia and volume overload). We show that HLHS cardiomyocytes, both within the heart and when...

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Structural health monitoring (SHM) is vital for maintaining the safety and longevity of civil infrastructure, yet current solutions remain constrained by cost, power consumption, scalability, and the complexity of data processing. Here, we present a diffractive vibration monitoring system, integrating a jointly optimized diffractive layer with a shallow neural network-based backend to remotely extract three-dimensional (3D) structural vibration spectra, offering a low-power, cost-effective, and...

Radiotherapy is a key foundation of oncologic treatment that is used across the spectrum of cancer indications. Advances in imaging, treatment planning, and dose delivery have led to increasingly conformal and even ablative treatments, which have resulted in improved tumor control with no increase in the risk of side effects (or with a decrease in risk) as compared with previous treatments. These advances have facilitated the combined use of radiotherapy with efficacious systemic therapies,...

Chaperone-mediated autophagy (CMA) is a selective autophagy pathway that targets specific proteins containing a KFERQ-like motif for lysosomal degradation. It has been shown by us and others that CMA decreases during physiological aging in most tissues, and its impairment is associated with increased incidence of age-related pathologies, such as cardiovascular disease, neurodegenerative disorders or sarcopenia. However, its involvement in age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a prevalent...

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Aging is accompanied by increasing inter-individual variability in cognitive and functional outcomes, reflecting differences in biological resilience and vulnerability. Chronic low-grade inflammation (inflammaging) is a central driver of this process, yet the contribution of individual inflammatory pathways to adaptive versus maladaptive brain aging remains incompletely understood. The NLRP3 inflammasome has been widely implicated in age-related neurodegeneration, but its physiological roles...

Deep neural networks (DNNs) trained on magnetic resonance images can estimate global brain age (GBA), which reflects women's neurological disease risk. GBA gap (GBAG), the difference between GBA and chronological age (CA), quantifies excessive global aging; local BAG (LBAG) has not been examined despite allowing voxelwise resolution. Using a novel DNN architecture, we estimate LBAG for 12,284 UK Biobank females with chronological ages (CAs) ranging between 46 and 82 years (y) and quantify how it...

Alzheimer's disease (AD) poses a significant global health challenge, being the most prominent cause of dementia with prevalence increasing as the population ages. While the majority of AD cases are late-onset (LOAD), current animal models predominantly represent the more aggressive, faster progressing early-onset AD (EOAD), limiting their ability in assessing early biomarkers and gaining deeper understanding of LOAD progression. This study explores a promising translatable model, the...

As the actuator of movement and a key regulator of organismal metabolism, skeletal muscle is a site at which inflammatory responses must be carefully calibrated to counteract stressors while preventing protracted functional impairments. Exercise, injury and aging are common forms of stress associated with inflammation; yet the specific inducers and sensors driving such inflammation remain poorly characterized. Multipronged assessment of acute and chronic endurance exercise models uncovered a...

Given the growing global interest in Healthy Longevity Medicine (HLM), the field lacks understanding about public knowledge and interest, which are crucial for any public health intervention relying on HLM. This study presents findings from the Healthy Longevity (HELO) survey conducted in Singapore, assessing public knowledge regarding lifespan (number of years a person is alive), healthspan (number of years a person spends in good health), and interest in HLM. This nationwide cross-sectional...

This Review discusses the current state of knowledge on the contribution of the gut microbiome as a potential key actor in defining how we age. The gut microbiome is a complex ecosystem that establishes lifelong dynamic interactions with the host at multiple levels (several gut-organ axes), differently influencing ageing patterns and age-related disease onset and progression across populations. Accordingly, the definition of a 'normative' gut microbiome remains elusive, depending largely on the...

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We investigated the association between physical activity (PA) intensity and dementia and cognitive decline in Australian community-dwelling older adults. This prospective cohort study uses data from 11,655 older adults (mean age (standard deviation, SD) = 75.0 (4.2) years, 53.4% females, 52.9% had completed ≥ 12 years of education), who were participants in the ASPirin in Reducing Events in the Elderly (ASPREE) clinical trial and its observational follow-on (ASPREE-XT) and the ASPREE...

Given global population aging and the absence of aging-reversal therapies, elucidating the aging-related cancer risk association and developing cancer prevention strategies are imperative. This population-based cohort study analyzed data from the UK Biobank. Aging was assessed through four validated markers, including Klemera-Doubal method (KDM), PhenoAge, leukocyte telomere length (TL) and chronological age. Over a median follow-up of 13.5 years, significant associations between all aging...

Interventions that extend lifespan in animal models could, in principle, decelerate the aging process as a whole. Alternatively, they could act by suppressing one or more individual late-life pathologies that contribute to mortality. Here we show how, in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, late-life pathologies can compete in a hierarchical fashion to cause death, such that removal of one cause of death can unmask another. Under standard culture conditions, a major cause of death in elderly C....