GeroScience

Gait variability is a critical functional indicator of dynamic balance and neurocognitive decline in health. Its translation into clinical practice is, however, challenged by a lack of age-related normative trajectories and reference values under real-world ecological settings. Furthermore, the conventional metrics used to estimate gait variability (Coefficient of Variation, CV; Standard Deviation, SD) have a fundamental methodological flaw: the inherent sensitivity of conventional metrics to th...

Background Older adults' walking has so far been evaluated using standardised assessments of walking capacity within a clinical setting. By taking the evaluation out of the laboratory into the real world, this study provides first evidence of the ability of Digital Mobility Outcomes (DMOs) to detect changes over time and the Minimal Important Difference (MID) in patients after proximal femoral fracture (PFF). This will guide the implementation of DMOs in research and clinical care. Methods For t...

As of early 2026, over 115 million US adults (more than 1 in 3) have prediabetes, a condition with an annual conversion rate of 5%-10% to type 2 diabetes. Total diabetes (diagnosed and undiagnosed) affects approximately 40.1 million Americans, or 12% of the population, with roughly 1.5 million new cases diagnosed annually. Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) provides real-time, 24/7 insights into glycemic variability, detecting dangerous highs, lows, and trends that HbA1c (a 3-month average) mis...

Introduction: Neurodegenerative diseases (NDDs) including Alzheimer's disease (AD), Parkinson's disease (PD), multiple sclerosis (MS), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and non-AD dementias share chronic neuroinflammatory mechanisms that contribute to neuronal injury and disease progression. While anti-inflammatory therapies (AITs) are associated with reduced neurodegenerative disease risk, knowledge regarding the impact of biological sex and treatment duration across multiple NDDs remains li...

Nocturnal glucose regulation is modulated by autonomic and circadian mechanisms, yet their dynamic interplay in apparently healthy, free-living populations remains poorly studied. Here, we assessed 227,860 nights of concurrent sleep data from Ultrahuman AIR ring and M1 continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) system across 5849 adults globally to examine nocturnal cardio-metabolic coupling. We found that higher sleep consistency was inversely associated with glucose variability, and vice versa. Unsup...

Introduction Heat waves are increasingly frequent and linked to higher mortality risks in Hong Kong. However, estimates of total excess mortality associated with heat waves remain unavailable. This study quantifies excess deaths associated with heat waves in Hong Kong from 2014 to 2023. Methods Daily age- and sex-specific mortality rates and population data were obtained from the Hong Kong Life Tables and Census and Statistics Department. Temperature data came from the Hong Kong Observatory, and...

Background and ObjectivesAssociations of common infections with Alzheimer disease (AD) risk have been reported. A hypothesized mechanism to explain these is cerebral amyloid-beta (A{beta}) aggregation as a defence in response to infection, with subsequent tau accumulation. However, few studies have assessed associations of infections with tau and A{beta} pathology. We investigated associations of serological measures of several common infections with plasma p-tau217 and A{beta} status measured b...

BackgroundThe relationship between hip osteoarthritis (hip OA) and Alzheimers disease (AD) presents a critical paradox within the emerging "bone-brain axis": widespread phenotypic comorbidity sharply contradicts evolutionary theories of biological antagonism. This study integrates longitudinal and multi-omic analyses to determine whether this clinical overlap masks an underlying genetic neuroprotection. MethodsWe analyzed longitudinal phenotypic data from 261,767 UK Biobank participants using C...

ObjectivesGrowth Mindset and Grit have been proposed as key psychological resources for resilience and adaptation, yet their manifestation and social distribution in later life remain underexplored. This study examines the structure, distribution, and correlates of Growth Mindset and Grit in older adulthood using proxy indicators in the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA). MethodsProxy indicators reflecting learning behaviour, personality traits, affect, and beliefs were used to derive ...

Background: Quantitative genome wide association studies (GWAS) primarily rely on additive linear models that compare average phenotypic differences between genotype groups. While effective for detecting common variants of moderate effect in large sample sizes, such approaches inherently reduce high resolution phenotypic data to summary statistics (group averages), potentially limiting the detection of subtle genotype phenotype relationships. Genomic Informational Field Theory (GIFT) is a recent...

OBJECTIVEUsing two cohorts and synthetic datasets, we estimated effects of prospectively reported alcohol use on memory outcomes across middle age. METHODSData were from National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979 (NLSY79, n=7540, alcohol reports from ages 18-26), Health and Retirement Study (HRS age 50-56 at enrollment, n=13,090), and a synthetic cohort matching early life exposure information from 3,259 NLSY79 participants to later life memory information from 5,451 HRS participants. Covariate-...

BackgroundDiabetes mellitus (DM) remains a major global health challenge and is associated with vision-threatening complications, including diabetic macular edema (DME), a leading cause of visual impairment. Dyslipidemia has been implicated in the development of macular edema through mechanisms involving vascular permeability, endothelial dysfunction, and chronic inflammation. However, evidence regarding the relationship between lipid abnormalities and macular edema remains inconsistent across s...

PurposeQuantitative metrics obtained from retinal fundus images (such as vessel length, tortuosity and other scale-dependent measures) are increasingly used as potential biomarkers for systemic diseases, including cardio- and neurovascular conditions. However, with the increasing prevalence of myopia and related axial growth, this study aims to evaluate if axial length scaling significantly alters the overall distributions of the inferred biomarkers when compared to biomarker data obtained witho...

PurposeTo investigate the effects of morning and evening narrowband blue light exposure on axial length, and to examine the short-term effect of morning blue light combined with myopic defocus on axial length. MethodsFor objective 1, 18 individuals underwent 60 minutes of narrowband blue light exposure (460nm) in the morning (9:00-11:00AM) and evening (5:00-7:00PM) of the same day. The axial length values were normalized to the average of the morning and evening axial length values. For objecti...

Wearable devices present transformative opportunities for personalized healthcare through continuous monitoring of digital biomarkers; however, individual variations in device wear time could mask or otherwise impact signal identification. Despite the widespread adoption of wearable devices in research, no comprehensive framework exists for understanding how wear time varies across populations or for addressing wear time-related biases in analysis. Using Fitbit data from 11,901 participants in t...

Objective: Evaluating and monitoring patients with cervical spondylotic myelopathy (CSM) remains a challenge due to limited tools for assessing objective neurological disability longitudinally and in the home environment. Given their prevalence and low cost, mobile health (mHealth), and specifically smartphone technologies offer a promising approach to fill this gap. This study explored stakeholder perspectives on the role of mHealth in CSM monitoring to inform development of a smartphone-based ...

The use of semaglutide (SE), a glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonist (GLP-1RA) with glucose-lowering and weight-loss effects, has risen rapidly, particularly among women of reproductive age. While preclinical studies suggest benefits for ovarian function via the hypothalamic-pituitary-ovarian axis, its impact on the endometrial-embryo interface remains unclear. Here, we show that GLP-1R is dynamically expressed in fertile human endometrium, restricted to epithelial cells and markedly upregula...

BackgroundA coronary artery calcium (CAC) score of 0 is widely considered to indicate low short- to intermediate-term risk for coronary artery disease (CAD) and is frequently used to defer lipid-lowering therapy. However, a subset of individuals with CAC=0 still experience events, highlighting residual risk not captured by imaging alone. Polygenic risk scores (PRS) quantify lifelong inherited susceptibility, but conventional approaches rely on predefined ancestry labels despite human genetic div...

Type 2 diabetes (T2D) affects 11.1% of the global population, underscoring the need for biomarkers that inform treatment response and glycemic outcomes. We evaluated the association between the FTO variant rs9939609-A and glycemic control in a Mexican population. A total of 174 individuals living with T2D from Merida and Sisal, Yucatan, were included, of whom 85% were receiving oral hypoglycemic agents as main treatment. Glycemic control was defined cross-sectionally as good ([≤]130 mg/dL, n=...

Health behaviors such as physical activity and sleep affect mental health, but the effect of each health behavior varies substantially across individuals, limiting the usefulness of generic behavioral recommendations. We collected one year of continuous wearable and ecological momentary assessment data from 3,139 participants in the Intern Health Study (2018-2023), and examined individual-level associations between wearable-derived features and mood across the internship year. The behaviors asso...