Aging is a complex biological process that detrimentally affects the brain and cerebrovascular system, contributing to the pathogenesis of age-related diseases like vascular cognitive impairment and dementia (VCID) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD). While cell-autonomous mechanisms that occur within cells, independent of external signals from neighboring cells or systemic factors, account for some aspects of aging, […]
Publications
Here lies all of this lab's publications by order of date. Click on the title of the paper to get more information about a publication, including the abstract, date of publication, and open access link if applicable.
Plasmapheresis as a Potential Generalizable Therapy for Myocardial Infarction
Myocardial infarction (MI) remains the leading cause of mortality and morbidity worldwide. It is caused by a thrombotic occlusion of coronary vessel/s that leads to cardiomyocyte death. As a response, inflammatory and fibrotic responses are initiated to replace the necrotic tissue and remodel the heart. However, in most cases, these responses are excessively activated, which […]
In Old Mice, Exercise Induces Inflammation and Fibrosis Unless Alk5-Inhibitor and Oxytocin Are Used
Exercise and diet are the best-known methods for attenuating aging-related health decline. However, exercise in older age has diminished gains of strength and agility, and a danger of unrepaired muscle damage. Improving the understanding of age-related differences in response to exercise, our results demonstrate that in old mice, downhill treadmill (eccentric) exercise causes increased influx […]
Misalignment of age clocks
Biological aging is a complex non-linear process, with markedly distinct starting and end points, yet the biomarkers of its progression remain elusive. A key assumption of most machine learning (ML) approaches for age clocks is that predictive biomedical features can be identified via mathematical transformations of data to favor a linear transition from start to […]
Propagation of senescent phenotypes by extracellular HMGB1 is dependent on its redox state
Background & purpose: Cellular senescence spreads systemically through blood circulation, but its mechanisms remain unclear. High mobility group box 1 (HMGB1), a multifunctional senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP) factor, exists in various redox states. Here, we investigate the role of redox-sensitive HMGB1 (ReHMGB1) in driving paracrine and systemic senescence. Methods: We applied the paracrine senescence cultured model to […]
The dominance of old blood, and age-related increase in protein production and noise
This concise review provides new perspectives on systemic reduction of tissue aging by comparing different strategies, such as heterochronic parabiosis, injections of young blood plasma, neutral blood exchange (NBE) and therapeutic plasma exchange (TPE). Unlike previous literature that primarily discusses the need for young blood factors, we emphasize the potential of diluting age-elevated proteins as […]
DNA methylation clocks struggle to distinguish inflammaging from healthy aging, but feature rectification improves coherence and enhances detection of inflammaging
Biological age estimation from DNA methylation and determination of relevant biomarkers is an active research problem which has predominantly been tackled with black-box penalized regression. Machine learning is used to select a small subset of features from hundreds of thousands CpG probes and to increase generalizability typically lacking with ordinary least-squares regression. Here, we show […]
Non-Intrinsic, Systemic Mechanisms of Cellular Senescence
Cellular senescence is believed to contribute to aging and disease through the activity of secreted factors that promote inflammation, remodel the extracellular matrix, and adversely modify the behavior of non-senescent cells. While the markers and properties of senescent cells are still under investigation, it is postulated that cellular senescence manifests in vivo as the consequence […]
Fail-tests of DNA methylation clocks, and development of a noise barometer for measuring epigenetic pressure of aging and disease
This study shows that Elastic Net (EN) DNA methylation (DNAme) clocks have low accuracy of predictions for individuals of the same age and a low resolution between healthy and disease cohorts; caveats inherent in applying linear model to non-linear processes. We found that change in methylation of cytosines with age is, interestingly, not the determinant […]
Old plasma dilution reduces human biological age: a clinical study.
This work extrapolates to humans the previous animal studies on blood heterochronicity and establishes a novel direct measurement of biological age. Our results support the hypothesis that, similar to mice, human aging is driven by age-imposed systemic molecular excess, the attenuation of which reverses biological age, defined in our work as a deregulation (noise) of […]