Volume 1 Issue 7, July 2021

Indigenous Australians, one of the oldest living civilizations in the world, are growing older despite centuries of health and social inequity. Further improvements in longevity and aging will require a life-course approach and community-led initiatives.

Nursing home residents account for 41% of all COVID-19 deaths. Understanding why this occurs and the interplay between infectious agent, person, nursing home environment and operations, and public health responses is essential for families and governments when making decisions to protect loved ones and citizens, respectively.

Inflammation is known to be elevated with progressive age. In this issue, Sayed et al. identify a group of circulating cytokines that correlate with health decline in aging, particularly the chemokine CXCL9. The findings offer a new understanding of how wellbeing and biological resilience are independent from chronological age.

The first longevity revolution led to lifespan extension. The next revolution will extend healthspan through the development of aging therapeutics. A new study describes the economic impact of success and how these interventions will work by analysing various scenarios labeled after characters from popular literature.

Facility-level factors associated with increased mortality rates among nursing home residents in Spain during the COVID-19 pandemic included a higher proportion of patients with complex diseases, lower scores on pandemic preparedness measures and higher COVID-19 incidence levels in the surrounding neighborhood.

The authors show that glial AP1 is initially protective after traumatic brain injury (TBI) but remains active chronically, driving tau pathology and degeneration. Glial AP1 similarly activates with normal aging, suggesting this may be accelerated by TBI.

From the blood immunome of 1,001 individuals aged 8–96 years, the authors used deep learning to develop an inflammatory clock of aging (iAge) that tracks with multimorbidity, immunosenescence, frailty and cardiovascular aging, and is also associated with exceptional longevity in centenarians. The main contributor to iAge is the chemokine CXCL9, which is shown to control endothelial cell senescence and function.

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.