Analyses

In a longitudinal population-based cohort, Liu et al. demonstrate that integrating polygenic risk scores and the gut microbiome improved prediction, over traditional risk factors, for heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer disease and prostate cancer.

Identifying individuals at risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease is an important task. Here Tang et al. leverage electronic health records to predict Alzheimer’s disease onset, and utilize knowledge networks to prioritize shared genes behind the clinical data as well as facilitate contextualization based on sex.

Stitching together electronic health records with partial longitudinal coverage, Mendelson Cohen et al. use machine learning to untangle healthy aging from chronic disease, identifying markers of healthy aging and analyzing the heritability of longevity.

Early type 2 diabetes (T2D) risk assessment could help slow or prevent disease onset. Here the authors used blood-based DNA methylation data to develop 10-year risk prediction models for incident T2D. The results show an improvement in performance beyond standard risk factors typically used to predict the risk of T2D onset.

The authors found that, across tissues and in multiple datasets, aging is accompanied by a length-associated transcriptome imbalance. In most cases, a decrease in the relative abundance of long transcripts was observed and could be reversed by interventions targeting aging.

The authors analyze microbiome profiles from several public repositories to identify the higher-level indices that best reflect the abundance and ranking of disease-associated and health-associated gut microbes and that may help identify targets for therapeutic modulation.

Transcription factors control cell identity and function in health, disease and aging. Here the authors identify age-associated changes of transcriptional regulatory networks in single cells, revealing cell-type and tissue-type-independent patterns in key pathways, including circadian rhythm, antigen processing, collagen processing and inflammation.

A systematic review examining evidence from 32 studies across five countries on associations between care home ownership and COVID-19 found that for-profit care homes were linked to worse COVID-19 outcomes (infections and mortality) compared to non-profit and public sector homes.

An economic analysis suggests that targeting aging offers potentially larger economic gains than eradicating individual diseases. Slowing aging to increase life expectancy by 1 year is worth US$38 trillion, and by 10 years, US$367 trillion.

Using genetic and demographic data from the UK Biobank, the authors clustered 116 common diseases based on their age-of-onset profiles and found increased genetic similarity within clusters, suggesting common etiologies. Two of the four disease clusters were associated with aging-related genes but differed in functional enrichment and evolutionary profiles.