Social support and memory in postmenopausal women: a careful null
A secondary analysis of the ELITE hormone-therapy trial found hints that social ties tracked with cognition, but none survived correction for multiple testing.
Tuning daytime and evening light did not improve older adults' sleep
In a 12-person crossover trial, blue-enriched daytime light with reduced evening blue did not cut time spent awake at night, though it nudged a brainwave marker of sleep.
Which muscles hold their strength through weight loss? A gene hunt
A transcriptomic sub-study of the CALERIE calorie-restriction trial links 151 genes to preserved leg strength during weight loss, independent of how much body mass was lost.
A statin cut heart attacks in healthy over-70s. Independent years did not follow.
STAREE randomised 9,971 Australians aged 70 and over to atorvastatin or placebo. Cardiovascular events fell by 30%. Death, dementia and persistent disability, taken together, did not move.
Grip strength predicts death better than blood pressure. A gripper won't change your odds.
In half a million people, weaker grip tracked with higher mortality — a strong marker. But it reads out whole-body strength and health, not a number you move by training your hands.
Dementia in the Middle East and North Africa is projected to rise 367% by 2050
A review pooling prevalence across the region ties the projection to modifiable risks that are unusually common there — smoking, inactivity, diabetes — layered on rapid ageing.
Age-related muscle loss is now a diagnosable disease. One treatment has strong backing.
Sarcopenia got a formal definition and diagnostic cut-offs. The clinical guidelines that followed back resistance exercise strongly — and are far more cautious about protein powders, vitamin D and drugs.
Cognitive reserve is real. What you can do about it is a smaller, honest list.
Autopsy studies show educated brains carry the same disease but express it as dementia later. That is the concept's strength — and the reason it resists being turned into a to-do list.
Fall prevention that works is mostly one thing: the right kind of exercise
Falls are the leading injury killer of older adults. The intervention with the strongest evidence is unglamorous — exercise that trains balance, gait and strength — and the trial data behind it is unusually solid.
The largest trial of hearing aids and cognitive decline found no overall effect
ACHIEVE randomised 977 older adults and measured three-year cognitive change. The difference between hearing aids and health education was 0.002 SD units, p=0.96. One subgroup result is doing a lot of work.
Exercise is sold as brain insurance. The trial evidence is weaker than the headlines.
Observational studies tie fitness to slower cognitive decline. When researchers randomise older adults to exercise, the cognitive payoff shrinks — in a Cochrane review of healthy people, to nothing.
AREDS supplements slow advanced macular degeneration. They do not prevent AMD.
The trials that made eye vitamins a standard recommendation enrolled only people who already had substantial disease. In AREDS2, neither omega-3 nor lutein beat placebo on the primary endpoint.
Crossword-doers decline more slowly. That is not the same as crosswords working.
The link between puzzles and a sharper old age is real in the data and largely the wrong way round: the earliest changes of dementia quietly reduce the very activities that later look protective.
Japan's long-term care insurance passed its equity test — with one exception
Twenty-two years of national data show income-related inequities in care use narrowing, and copayment increases for higher earners not reversing that. Services carrying extra user charges are the outlier.
Older Japanese adults who cooked weekly had lower dementia rates — with a large asterisk
A six-year cohort study using Japan's long-term care records found a roughly 25% lower risk. The design cannot separate cooking from the ability to cook.
A hand squeeze and five chair stands predicted nine long-term conditions
Pooling 94 cohort studies, grip strength tracked with later dementia, depression and disability. The authors rate their own confidence in the numbers as limited to moderate.
A single-cell hippocampus atlas finds neurogenic cells and a SuperAger signature
Researchers profiled nearly 356,000 nuclei from post-mortem hippocampi across five groups. Chromatin accessibility in neurogenic cells was already altered in people with preclinical Alzheimer's pathology.
Eight phone calls cut loneliness in older adults — and the effect held a year later
A 1,151-person Hong Kong trial used trained lay counsellors, not clinicians, and no internet. The effect sizes are small, and the authors are explicit that they do not know whether it travels.
A sequencing method accurate enough to count mutations one molecule at a time
Two Nature papers apply duplex sequencing with fewer than five errors per billion bases to cheek swabs and sperm — finding 46 genes under selection in mouth lining and a fatherhood risk that rises with age.
Two October papers on creatine in older adults point at strength, not muscle mass
A meta-analysis of 20 trials found a two-kilogram gain in one-rep max and no effect on bone density. A small crossover trial found functional strength gains largely independent of muscle mass.
Massaging lymph vessels through the skin doubled brain fluid drainage in mice
A Nature paper maps the route cerebrospinal fluid takes to neck lymph nodes, finds the route degrades with age, and reports a mechanical device that reopened it in old mice.