A great deal of funding and effort goes into attempts to quantify the effects of lifestyle choices on long-term health, incidence of disease, and age-related mortality. Perhaps more than is useful, given what we know about the limits of the possible. Exercise improves the quality of later life, but you can't exercise your way out of being physically aged and ultimately dying from age-related disease. Animal studies demonstrate that some forms of treatment, such as senolytics, can achieve degrees of delay or reversal of aspects of aging beyond that of any lifestyle choice. Research attention might be better focused on that sort of exploration. Further, one might argue that more data on the benefits of a better lifestyle is not actionable: it doesn't instruct us to do anything that we didn't already know that we should be doing. Still, today's open access paper is representative of a sizable body of work and ongoing effort on the part of the scientific community.
The American Heart Association introduced Life's Essential 8 (LE8) as a comprehensive set of eight metrics that reflect health behaviours that support cardiovascular health (CVH), with the aim to help older individuals maintain CVH and live longer and healthier. These eight measures are categorized into two major areas: health behaviours (eating healthier foods, being more active, quitting tobacco, getting healthy sleep) and health factors (managing weight, controlling cholesterol, managing blood glucose, managing blood pressure). Beyond its association with CVH, LE8 is increasingly recognized for its impact on neurological health. Recent studies linked higher LE8 scores with neuroimaging markers of better brain health.
This cross-sectional study utilized data from the UK Biobank. Regional fractional anisotropy measures from diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) data were used to predict white matter brain age via random forest regression. The white matter brain age gap (BAG) was calculated by subtracting chronological age from predicted brain age. As compared to other neuroimaging markers like brain volume and white matter hyperintensities, white matter BAG is more sensitive to early and subtle change in WM integrity. The analysis included 18,817 participants (mean age 55.45). Higher LE8 scores were associated with a lower white matter BAG, indicating delayed brain ageing. The effect was more pronounced in non-APOE4 carriers (124 days younger per 10-point increase) compared to APOE4 carriers (84 days younger per 10-point increase). Potential interaction between APOE4 and LE8 on brain ageing was observed for some age and sex groups but with only borderline significance, further investigation in larger and more targeted studies is needed to validate the finding.
Link: https://doi.org/10.1...iom.2025.105723
View the full article at FightAging
