{"id":30775,"date":"2025-06-30T15:15:14","date_gmt":"2025-06-30T15:15:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=30775"},"modified":"2025-06-30T15:24:24","modified_gmt":"2025-06-30T15:24:24","slug":"a-common-assumption-about-aging-may-be-wrong-study-suggests","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=30775","title":{"rendered":"A Common Assumption About Aging May Be Wrong, Study Suggests"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Experts have long pointed to inflammation as a natural part of getting older. But a new paper suggests it might be more a product of our environment.<\/p>\n

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A new analysis of data gathered from a small Indigenous population in the Bolivian Amazon suggests some of our basic assumptions about the biological process of aging might be wrong.<\/p>\n

Inflammation is a natural immune response that protects the body from injury or infection. Scientists have long believed that long-term, low-grade inflammation \u2014 also known as \u201cinflammaging\u201d \u2014 is a universal hallmark of getting older. But this new data raises the question of whether inflammation is directly linked to aging at all, or if\u2019s linked to a person\u2019s lifestyle or environment instead.<\/p>\n

The study, which was published today,<\/a> found that people in two nonindustrialized areas experienced a different kind of inflammation throughout their lives than more urban people \u2014 likely tied to infections from bacteria, viruses and parasites rather than the precursors of chronic disease. Their inflammation also didn\u2019t appear to increase with age.<\/p>\n

Scientists compared inflammation signals in existing data sets from four distinct populations in Italy, Singapore, Bolivia and Malaysia; because they didn\u2019t collect the blood samples directly, they couldn\u2019t make exact apples-to-apples comparisons. But if validated in larger studies, the findings could suggest that diet, lifestyle and environment influence inflammation more than aging itself, said Alan Cohen, an author of the paper and an associate professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cInflammaging may not be a direct product of aging, but rather a response to industrialized conditions,\u201d he said, adding that this was a warning to experts like him that they might be overestimating its pervasiveness globally.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow we understand inflammation and aging health is based almost entirely on research in high-income countries like the U.S.,\u201d said Thomas McDade, a biological anthropologist at Northwestern University. But a broader look shows that there\u2019s much more global variation in aging than scientists previously thought, he added.<\/p>\n

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Experts have long pointed to inflammation as a natural part of getting older. But a new paper suggests it might be more a product of our environment.A new analysis of data gathered from a small Indigenous population in the Bolivian Amazon suggests some of our basic assumptions about the biological process of aging might be wrong.Inflammation is a natural immune response that protects the body from injury or infection. Scientists have long believed that long-term, low-grade inflammation \u2014 also known as \u201cinflammaging\u201d \u2014 is a universal hallmark of getting older. But this new data raises the question of whether inflammation is directly linked to aging at all, or if\u2019s linked to a person\u2019s lifestyle or environment instead.The study, which was published today, found that people in two nonindustrialized areas experienced a different kind of inflammation throughout their lives than more urban people \u2014 likely tied to infections from bacteria, viruses and parasites rather than the precursors of chronic disease. Their inflammation also didn\u2019t appear to increase with age.Scientists compared inflammation signals in existing data sets from four distinct populations in Italy, Singapore, Bolivia and Malaysia; because they didn\u2019t collect the blood samples directly, they couldn\u2019t make exact apples-to-apples comparisons. But if validated in larger studies, the findings could suggest that diet, lifestyle and environment influence inflammation more than aging itself, said Alan Cohen, an author of the paper and an associate professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University.\u201cInflammaging may not be a direct product of aging, but rather a response to industrialized conditions,\u201d he said, adding that this was a warning to experts like him that they might be overestimating its pervasiveness globally.\u201cHow we understand inflammation and aging health is based almost entirely on research in high-income countries like the U.S.,\u201d said Thomas McDade, a biological anthropologist at Northwestern University. But a broader look shows that there\u2019s much more global variation in aging than scientists previously thought, he added.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":30777,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lifestyle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30775"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30775\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30778,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30775\/revisions\/30778"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/30777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}