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Facing up to the global challenges of ageing

Nature volume 561, pages 45–56 (2018)Cite this article

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Abstract

Longer human lives have led to a global burden of late-life disease. However, some older people experience little ill health, a trait that should be extended to the general population. Interventions into lifestyle, including increased exercise and reduction in food intake and obesity, can help to maintain healthspan. Altered gut microbiota, removal of senescent cells, blood factors obtained from young individuals and drugs can all improve late-life health in animals. Application to humans will require better biomarkers of disease risk and responses to interventions, closer alignment of work in animals and humans, and increased use of electronic health records, biobank resources and cohort studies.

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Fig. 1: Cumulative survival and age-specific death rates in the Netherlands in 1850, 1900 and 1950.
Fig. 2: Disability-adjusted life years for age-related diseases in three global regions.
Fig. 3: Schematic representation of the timing and progression of age-related phenotypes in adult humans.
Fig. 4: Ageing is characterized by mechanistic hallmarks that contribute to ageing to different extents in different organisms, and in different cell types within an organism.

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Acknowledgements

We thank N. van den Berg for help with the preparation of Fig. 1 and N. Chaturvedi and B. J. Zwaan for their critical reading of the manuscript. L.P. acknowledges support from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (no. 741989) and a Wellcome Trust Strategic Award. J.D. acknowledges support from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. We apologize to the authors of many relevant studies for not citing their work owing to space limitations.

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Nature thanks V. D. Longo and J. Vijg for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing, Cologne, Germany

    Linda Partridge, Joris Deelen & P. Eline Slagboom

  2. Institute of Healthy Ageing, and Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment, UCL, London, UK

    Linda Partridge

  3. Molecular Epidemiology, Department of Biomedical Data Sciences, Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Joris Deelen & P. Eline Slagboom

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Partridge, L., Deelen, J. & Slagboom, P.E. Facing up to the global challenges of ageing. Nature 561, 45–56 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0457-8

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