Brain Aging - Inflammation & Aging - GLP-1 & Migraine - Glial Shaping

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Jul 2, 2025, 8:58:25 AMJul 2

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02086-9

How fast are you ageing? Ordinary brain scans reveal the pace

Heidi Ledford

Telltale features in standard brain images can reveal how quickly a person is ageing, a study of more than 50,000 brain scans has shown1.

Pivotal features include the thickness of the cerebral cortex — a region that controls language and thinking — and the volume of grey matter that it contains. These and other characteristics can predict how quickly a person’s ability to think and remember will decline with age, as well as their risk of frailty, disease and death.

Although it’s too soon to use the new results in the clinic, the test provides advantages over previously reported ‘clocks’ — typically based on blood tests — that purport to measure the pace of ageing, says Mahdi Moqri, a computational biologist who studies ageing at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts.

“Imaging offers unique, direct insights into the brain’s structural ageing, providing information that blood-based or molecular biomarkers alone can’t capture,” says Moqri, who was not involved in the study. The results were published today in Nature Aging.

Genetics, environment and disease all affect the speed of biological ageing. As a result, chronological age does not always reflect the pace at which time takes its toll on the body. Researchers have been racing to develop measures to fill that gap.

Ageing clocks could be used early in life to assess an individual’s risk of age-related illness, when it might still be possible to intervene. They could also aid testing of treatments aimed at slowing ageing, by providing a marker to track the effects of the intervention in real time.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/30/well/live/aging-inflammation-lifespan-environment.html

Common Assumption About Aging May Be Wrong, Study Suggests

By Mohana Ravindranath

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 — also known as “inflammaging” — 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 it’s linked to a person’s 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 — likely tied to infections from bacteria, viruses and parasites rather than the precursors of chronic disease. Their inflammation also didn’t 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’t collect the blood samples directly, they couldn’t 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.

“Inflammaging may not be a direct product of aging, but rather a response to industrialized conditions,” he said, adding that this was a warning to experts like him that they might be overestimating its pervasiveness globally.

“How we understand inflammation and aging health is based almost entirely on research in high-income countries like the U.S.,” said Thomas McDade, a biological anthropologist at Northwestern University. But a broader look shows that there’s much more global variation in aging than scientists previously thought, he added.

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https://www.sciencenews.org/article/weight-loss-drugs-migraines

Popular weight-loss drugs may ease migraines too

By Laura Sanders

GLP-1 drugs may possess a new power: Easing migraines. In a small, preliminary study, a GLP-1 drug nearly halved the number of days people spent with a migraine in a given month.

The results, presented June 21 at the European Academy of Neurology Congress in Helsinki, Finland, expand the possible benefits of the powerful new class of obesity and diabetes drugs. These pernicious, debilitating headaches are estimated to affect one billion people worldwide.

Earlier studies have shown that GLP-1 agonists can reduce the pressure inside the skull, a squeeze that’s been implicated in migraines. Neurologist Simone Braca of the University of Naples Federico II in Italy and his colleagues explored whether liraglutide, an older relative of Ozempic and Wegovy, might help migraine sufferers. Thirty-one adults, 26 of them women, got daily injections of liraglutide for 12 weeks. These adults all had obesity and continued to take their current migraine medicines too.

At the start of the experiment, participants had headaches on about 20 days out of a month. After 12 weeks of liraglutide, the average number dropped to about 11 days. “Basically, we observed that patients saw their days with headache halved, which is huge,” Braca says. Participants’ weight stayed about the same during the trial, suggesting that headache reductions weren’t tied to weight loss.

If the results hold up in larger studies, they may point to treatments for migraine sufferers who aren’t helped by existing drugs. The results may also lead to a deeper understanding of the role of pressure inside the head in migraines, Braca says.

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https://www.thetransmitter.org/astrocytes/astrocytes-sense-neuromodulators-to-orchestrate-neuronal-activity-and-shape-behavior/

Astrocytes sense neuromodulators to orchestrate neuronal activity and shape behavior

By Claudia López Lloreda

When it comes to cognition and behavior, neurons usually take center stage. They famously drive everything from thoughts to movements by way of synaptic communication, with the help of neuromodulators such as dopamine, norepinephrine and certain immune molecules that regulate neuronal activity and plasticity.

But astrocytes play essential roles in these processes behind the scenes, according to four independent studies published in the past two months. Rather than acting solely on neurons, neuromodulators also act on astrocytes to influence neuronal function and behavior—making astrocytes crucial intermediates in activities previously attributed to direct communication between neurons, the studies suggest. For instance, norepinephrine sensitizes astrocytes to neurotransmitters and prompts them to regulate circuit computations, synapse function and various behaviors across diverse animal models, three of the studies—all published last month in Science—show.

“Do neurons actually signal through astrocytes in a meaningful way during normal behavior or normal circuit function?” asks Marc Freeman, senior scientist at Oregon Health & Science University and principal investigator on one of the Science studies. These new findings “argue very strongly the answer is yes.”

Astrocytes can also detect peripheral inflammation and modify the neurons that drive a stress-induced fear behavior in mice, according to the fourth study, published in April in Nature.

Although astrocytes are no longer thought of as simply support cells, they were still “not really considered for having a real plasticity and a real important role,” says Caroline Menard, associate professor of psychiatry and neurosciences at the University of Laval, who was not involved in any of the new studies. Now “there’s more consideration from the field that behavior is not only driven by neurons, but there’s other cell types involved.”