Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Aging trajectories vary widely across individuals, even under comparable biological and environmental pressures, yet most biomedical frameworks prioritize vulnerability over protection.This perspective proposes a shift towards identifying resilient expotype-phenotypes, defined by combinations of exposures and individual adaptive responses that support unexpectedly healthy aging.We propose multimodal aging clocks (focusing on delayed agers) to address resilience and its phenotypic and expotype contributions.Building on recent evidence from global exposome analyses 1-4 , multimodal aging clocks 1,5-8 and neuroecological frameworks 2,9 , we argue that resilience offers an essential dimension for precision brain health.The exposome 1,10 captures the totality of physical, social and sociopolitical exposures across the lifespan, exerting marked influences on biological, systemic and cognitive health.This multidimensional construct provides a foundation for defining expotypes 11 , the characteristic combinations of exposures that shape individual risk or protection 12 .Aging clocks (epigenetic clocks, proteomic or multi-omic clocks, brain clocks and biobehavioural clocks) quantify biological aging relative to chronological time, enabling direct assessment of how exposures modulate aging trajectories.These tools reveal that diverse exposures, from pollution and temperature peaks to structural inequalities and political instability, accelerate biological aging, 1,2,6 whereas enriching environments, cognitive stimulation and social cohesion may delay it.Together, they provide a framework for evaluating how cumulative exposures influence aging across datasets, populations and biological systems 12,13 .Thus, the exposome and aging clocks may jointly enable a more mechanistic assessments of how protective and adverse exposures shape biological aging across systems.
DOI: 10.1002/ctm2.70558
Authors: Hernan Hernandez, Agustin Ibanez
Language: English
Subfield: Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $3,470
OpenAlex ID: W7117355347