J Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci
August 2025
Aging is the leading risk factor for most chronic disease. However, disease risk varies substantially between individuals of the same age. Biological aging measures attempt to quantify this difference using biomarkers; such measures have amassed substantial evidence as reliable correlates of morbidity and mortality.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPolygenic scores (PGSs) for body mass index (BMI) may guide early prevention and targeted treatment of obesity. Using genetic data from up to 5.1 million people (4.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMobility is a cornerstone of health and quality of life, particularly in older adults. Digital mobility outcomes (DMOs) from real-world walking data offer crucial insights into the functional status and early markers of mobility decline. This study provides reference values for walking activity, pace, rhythm, and gait bout-to-bout variability in community-dwelling older adults and evaluates the effects of age, sex, height, and weight on these parameters.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInflammaging, an age-associated increase in chronic inflammation, is considered a hallmark of aging. However, there is no consensus approach to measuring inflammaging based on circulating cytokines. Here we assessed whether an inflammaging axis detected in the Italian InCHIANTI dataset comprising 19 cytokines could be generalized to a different industrialized population (Singapore Longitudinal Aging Study) or to two indigenous, nonindustrialized populations: the Tsimane from the Bolivian Amazon and the Orang Asli from Peninsular Malaysia.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMech Ageing Dev
August 2025
Galectin-3-binding protein (Lgals3bp), a heavily glycosylated protein that plays a role in cell growth, inflammation, and cellular adhesion, has been associated with tumor development and more recently with carbohydrate and lipid metabolism. The primary aims of these analyses are to examine in the InCHIANTI study participants: 1) the cross-sectional correlations of Lgals3bp serum levels with biomarkers of inflammation, glucose, and cholesterol metabolism; 2) the longitudinal association between baseline Lgals3bp serum levels with changes over time of inflammatory markers, blood glucose, and cholesterol. The InCHIANTI study enrolled representative samples from the registry lists of two towns in Tuscany, Italy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: The older population is growing fast, and it is important to investigate the cardiovascular health factors and behaviors that are associated with cardiovascular disease (CVD) and mortality among older individuals.
Methods: A total of 920 older adults (mean age: 74 years, 55% women) from the InCHIANTI study were included for analysis. Cardiovascular health (CVH) was assessed using the Life's Essential 8 (LE8) developed by the American Heart Association, including 8 health behaviors (smoking, diet, physical activity, sleep) and factors (body mass index, blood cholesterol, blood glucose, blood pressure).
The neuromuscular junction shows several degenerative changes with aging, resulting in a reduction of transmission efficacy. These changes, paired with low-grade chronic inflammation, were considered triggers of the aging muscle processes. The main objective of this study is to assess the role of leukocyte count-derived ratios, nerve conduction velocity (NCV), and compound muscle action potential (CMAP) in determining time-dependent reduction in lower limb muscle explosive strength, a condition that has been defined as powerpenia.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: To evaluate the association between dairy products consumption and the probability of frailty transitions in community-dwelling older adults.
Design: Longitudinal study.
Setting And Participants: We included 863 community-dwelling participants ≥65 years from the Chianti region in Italy.
J Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci
February 2025
Background: Poor muscle strength is a risk factor for disability; nonetheless, its discriminative capacity in identifying people who will become disabled is poor. We evaluated whether muscle power, which also is a risk factor for disability, has better discriminative capacity compared to muscle strength.
Methods: We used data from the population-based InCHIANTI study.
Iron homoeostasis is tightly regulated, with hepcidin and soluble transferrin receptor (sTfR) playing significant roles. However, the genetic determinants of these traits and the biomedical consequences of iron homoeostasis variation are unclear. In a meta-analysis of 12 cohorts involving 91,675 participants, we found 43 genomic loci associated with either hepcidin or sTfR concentration, of which 15 previously unreported.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Dementia poses considerable challenges to healthy aging. Prevention and management of dementia are essential given the lack of effective treatments for this condition.
Methods: A secondary data analysis was conducted using data from 928 InCHIANTI study participants (55% female) aged 65 years and older without dementia at baseline.
Few studies have evaluated the association between circulating levels of 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25(OH)D), 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D (1,25(OH)D), and the endocrine disruptor bisphenol A (BPA), with risk of cardiovascular (CV) disease in elderly individuals. This was a cross-sectional study in a subgroup of elderly people from the InCHIANTI Biobank in Italy. We examined the association between circulating serum vitamin D metabolites, 1,25(OH)D, 25(OH)D, and the endocrine disrupting agent BPA, with an arbitrary CV risk score and the European Society of Cardiology-based 10-year CV risk (SCORE2/SCORE2-OP) using univariate and multiple regression.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci
May 2024
There is consistent evidence that immune response declines with aging, with wide interindividual variability and a still unclear relationship with the development of frailty. To address this question, we assessed the role of immune resilience (capacity to restore immune functions), operationalized as the neutrophil-to-lymphocytes ratio (NL-ratio) and monocytes-to-lymphocytes ratio (ML-ratio), in the pathway that from robust status shifts to pre-frailty and frailty, and finally to death. The InCHIANTI study enrolled representative samples from the registry lists of 2 towns in Tuscany, Italy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImmunosenescence is the age-related changes in the immune system, namely, progressively higher levels of circulating inflammatory markers, characteristics changes of circulating immune subset cells and altered immune function. The neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio (NL ratio) has been identified as a prognostic indicator for neoplastic disease progression, in predicting chronic degenerative diseases, and as a potential indirect marker of healthy aging. This study aims to examine the longitudinal association of neutrophil, lymphocyte absolute count, and their ratio with longitudinal risk for multimorbidity and mortality.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: It is unknown whether dietary intake of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) modifies the cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk associated with a family history of CVD. We assessed interactions between biomarkers of low PUFA intake and a family history in relation to long-term CVD risk in a large consortium.
Methods: Blood and tissue PUFA data from 40 885 CVD-free adults were assessed.
Cellular senescence, a hallmark of aging, results in a senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP) with an increased production of proinflammatory cytokines, growth factors, and proteases. Evidence from nonhuman models demonstrates that SASP contributes to tissue dysfunction and pathological effects of aging. However, there are relatively few human studies on the relationship between SASP and aging-related health outcomes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIEEE Trans Biomed Eng
March 2024
Objective: Postural control naturally declines with age, leading to an increased risk of falling. Within clinical settings, the deployment of balance assessments has become commonplace, facilitating the identification of postural instability and targeted interventions to forestall falls among older adults. Some studies have ventured beyond the controlled laboratory, leaving, however, a gap in our understanding of balance in real-world scenarios.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhile some old adults stay healthy and non-frail up to late in life, others experience multimorbidity and frailty often accompanied by a pro-inflammatory state. The underlying molecular mechanisms for those differences are still obscure. Here, we used gene expression analysis to understand the molecular underpinning between non-frail and frail individuals in old age.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci
February 2024
Aging is characterized by chronic low-level inflammation and is associated with geriatric syndromes such as sarcopenia and frailty. Our aim was to evaluate the longitudinal variation of muscle area, muscle quality, and muscle strength, relative to the variation of leukocyte-derived markers, and to assess the presence of a pathway of associations among derived leukocyte ratios, and the components of muscle health. The InCHIANTI is a longitudinal cohort study of aging that began in 1998 with follow-up visits every 3 years.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Neutrophils and lymphocytes represent the larger percentage of all white blood cells, they vary with age, with a progressive increase of the ratio in the first years of life, and then tend to remain at similar levels in steady state condition during adult age. Neutrophils to lymphocytes-ratio (NL-ratio) was proposed as an effective and low-cost marker to monitor and predict the evolution of several clinical conditions. The main objective of the study is to analyze its temporal trend variation, over twenty years' follow-up, according to age, sex, and main clinical diagnosis, in a large representative Italian population.
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