All posts tagged: healthy aging

1 million XPRIZE Healthspan competition advances 20 teams to finals with UCSD named as testing hub

$101 million XPRIZE Healthspan competition advances 20 teams to finals with UCSD named as testing hub

Published by Jenni Sidey

Twenty finalist teams have advanced in the $101 million XPRIZE Healthspan competition, including groups developing treatments aimed at slowing age-related decline. Ten Milestone 2 Awardees will each receive $1 million and testing support as they prepare clinical trials focused on muscle, brain and immune function. The competition runs through 2030, when a grand prize of up to $81 million will go to teams that can demonstrate major gains in healthy human aging. Salt Lake City became the center of a global race against age-related decline as XPRIZE announced 20 finalist teams pursuing treatments designed to help people stay stronger, sharper and healthier for longer. Ten of those finalists, spanning the United States, South Korea, Japan and China, were named Milestone 2 Awardees. Each receives $1 million, along with access to clinical testing resources, as the $101 million XPRIZE Healthspan competition moves toward human trials and its 2030 finale. The seven-year competition began in 2023 with more than 600 applicants. Teams are being challenged to develop treatments that restore muscle, cognitive and immune function in adults …

Nearly half of dementia cases can be prevented, study finds

Nearly half of dementia cases can be prevented, study finds

Published by Jenni Sidey

Memory loss is often treated like weather, something that arrives with age and cannot be stopped. But dementia does not fit that story. A growing body of research suggests many cases are tied to risks people can act on, yet a new international review finds that public health campaigns still struggle to turn that message into lasting change. The review, led by Curtin University researchers and published in The Lancet Healthy Longevity, examined 12 population-level interventions across eight countries. Together, the studies point to a stubborn problem: broad awareness campaigns can reach large audiences, but they usually produce only small gains in knowledge and even smaller shifts in behavior. That matters because dementia is no small public health challenge. More than 57 million people worldwide live with the condition, and that total is expected to nearly triple by 2050. The Lancet Commission has estimated that about 45 percent of dementia cases may be linked to modifiable risk factors across the life course. Professor Mario Siervo, from Curtin’s School of Population Health, said the findings exposed …

Better fitness in your 40s and 50s linked to a longer, healthier life

Better fitness in your 40s and 50s linked to a longer, healthier life

Published by Jenni Sidey

Researchers have found that cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) during midlife provides a greater benefit than just living longer. It also means that the onset of serious illnesses is delayed. This is one of the main points of a new study published in JACC, the American College of Cardiology’s flagship journal. The study found that those who had higher levels of CRF during middle age not only lived longer, but also experienced major chronic diseases later in life and spent more years living in good health. When looking at these results, it is important to separate living longer from living longer without any major chronic disease, such as heart disease, diabetes, kidney disease, cancer, etc. Cardiorespiratory fitness, or CRF, refers to how efficiently your heart and lungs supply oxygen for physical activities. For many years, it has been established that individuals with higher levels of CRF have a lower risk of dying from heart disease or other illnesses that might result in an early death. Now we see that CRF in midlife is also related to what …

You don’t need exhausting workouts to build strength and health, study finds

You don’t need exhausting workouts to build strength and health, study finds

Published by Jenni Sidey

If you think better workouts must leave you drained, sore, or barely able to walk the next day, this research takes aim at that idea. A review led by Edith Cowan University argues that muscle damage is not required to build muscle size, strength, or performance. Instead, the paper makes the case for eccentric exercise, the kind of muscle work that happens while a muscle lengthens, such as lowering a dumbbell, walking downstairs, or sitting down slowly into a chair. “The idea that exercise must be exhausting or painful is holding people back,” ECU’s Director of Exercise and Sports Science, Professor Ken Nosaka, said. That message runs against a stubborn fitness belief. Many people still link progress with soreness, especially delayed onset muscle soreness, or DOMS. But the paper says soreness after eccentric exercise is mostly tied to unfamiliar effort, and it usually drops when the same exercise is repeated. The idea that exercise must be exhausting or painful is holding people back. (CREDIT: Shutterstock) The authors argue that this matters because eccentric exercise can …

Midlife exercise linked to a 50% longer life for women

Midlife exercise linked to a 50% longer life for women

Published by Jenni Sidey

Halfway through life, the body starts changing in ways that are easy to miss at first. Muscle mass begins to thin. Strength can slip gradually. Daily movement, once automatic, may take more planning than it did years earlier. A new study suggests that what women do during that stretch of life can shape what comes next in a very serious way: those who consistently met exercise guidelines in their 50s and 60s were about half as likely to die early as women who did not. The research, published in PLOS Medicine, followed 11,169 Australian women born between 1946 and 1951. Over 15 years, researchers tracked whether they were meeting the World Health Organization’s recommendation of at least 150 minutes a week of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity. The strongest finding was not about a short burst of fitness or a temporary health kick. It was about consistency. Women who kept meeting those activity targets across midlife had half the risk of death from any cause compared with women who consistently fell short. The study also found signs …

Daily multivitamin use may slow biological aging, study finds

Daily multivitamin use may slow biological aging, study finds

Published by Jenni Sidey

A daily multivitamin did not turn back the clock in any dramatic sense. But in a large clinical trial of older adults, it did appear to slow one version of aging that researchers can measure in blood. The effect was modest, about four months less biological aging over two years, according to an analysis led by Mass General Brigham investigators and published in Nature Medicine. Still, the finding stood out because it came from a randomized trial, not an observational study, and because the biggest gains appeared in people who started out biologically older than their actual age. “There is a lot of interest today in identifying ways to not just live longer, but to live better,” said senior author Howard Sesso, associate director of the Division of Preventive Medicine in the Mass General Brigham Department of Medicine. “It was exciting to see benefits of a multivitamin linked with markers of biological aging.” The work used data from the COSMOS trial, a large study that tested both a daily multivitamin and cocoa extract in older …

Nearly half of older adults improve in cognition or walking over time

Nearly half of older adults improve in cognition or walking over time

Published by Jenni Sidey

A steady slide into frailty is the story many people tell themselves about old age. The numbers in a long-running federal survey tell a messier tale. In a new study led by Becca R. Levy at Yale University, nearly half of older adults tracked for up to 12 years improved in at least one basic marker of brain or body function. The odds of improvement rose with something that rarely gets treated like a health factor at all: whether someone started out with more positive beliefs about aging. “Many people equate aging with an inevitable and continuous loss of physical and cognitive abilities,” Levy said. “What we found is that improvement in later life is not rare, it’s common, and it should be included in our understanding of the aging process.” When the average hides the people Levy, a professor of social and behavioral sciences at Yale School of Public Health, and co-author Martin Slade, a lecturer in occupational medicine at Yale School of Medicine and in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the …