A recent editorial titled “Physical fitness and lifestyles associated with biological aging” highlights how staying physically fit and making healthy lifestyle choices can influence the aging process at a biological level.
The editorial, published in the journal Aging, emphasizes the importance of targeting aging itself rather than focusing solely on treating individual diseases.
As the global population ages, researchers are increasingly interested in strategies that can delay the overall aging process, which in turn could prevent the onset of age-related diseases.
This approach, known as the geroscience hypothesis, is gaining attention due to advances in aging research.
These advances include better ways to measure aging biomarkers, thanks to improvements in technology and data analysis.
The editorial, authored by researchers from Waseda University in Japan and the Hungarian University of Sports Science, explores the connection between physical fitness, particularly cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF), and biological aging.
They focus on how fitness levels might influence the DNA methylation (DNAm) aging clock, a biomarker that reflects how quickly our bodies are aging at the cellular level.
The researchers aim to establish fitness reference values that could help delay the aging process.
They discuss findings from their recent study, which examined the relationship between CRF, lifestyle factors, and DNA methylation-based aging clocks in older men as part of WASEDA’S Health Study.
The results suggest that an active lifestyle can positively impact measurable molecular biomarkers that track biological aging.
In simpler terms, staying fit and leading a healthy lifestyle may actually slow down the aging process on a cellular level. This supports the idea that how we live our lives—how much we exercise, what we eat, and other lifestyle choices—can have a direct impact on how quickly we age.
The study reinforces the growing belief that targeting aging itself, rather than just treating individual diseases, could be a powerful way to improve health as we grow older.
By focusing on maintaining physical fitness and making healthy lifestyle choices, we may be able to slow down the biological aging process and enjoy better health in our later years.
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