Study of Longitudinal Aging in Mice

衰老是一种生物学过程，其特征是与时间相关的功能衰退，这与一些已知会缩短健康寿命的生理和精神疾病有关，包括能量代谢、慢性炎症、心血管功能障碍和心血管疾病以及神经元功能障碍[1]。在NIA，巴尔的摩老龄化纵向研究(BLSA)旨在表征与疾病发展无关的随着衰老而发生的身体、功能和认知变化，以及疾病影响与年龄相关表型的出现和发展的机制。到目前为止，证据还不足以表明小鼠是否可以被用作完全概括人类衰老过程中发生的相同生理变化的模式生物。建立这种等价性对于决定在小鼠身上进行的研究是否可以转化为人类衰老很重要(2)。因此，我们正在对小鼠进行广泛的纵向研究，以确定那些在小鼠和人类中随年龄变化的生物标记物，以及在两种生物中预测疾病发生和生存的生物标记物。

Aging is a biological process characterized by time-dependent functional declines that have been associated with a number of physical and mental conditions known to reduce healthspan, including energetic metabolism, chronic inflammation, cardiovascular dysfunction and cardiovascular diseases as well as neuronal dysfunction (1). At NIA, the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of aging (BLSA) is aimed at characterizing physical, functional and cognitive changes that occur with aging independent of disease development as well as the mechanisms by which disease can affect the emergence and progression of age-related phenotypes. To date, the evidence is insufficient to tell whether mice can be used as a model organism that fully recapitulates the same physiological changes that occur in human aging. Establishing such equivalence is important to decide whether research conducted in mouse is translatable to human aging (2). Thus, we are performing an extensive longitudinal study in mice to identify those biomarkers that change with aging both in mice and in humans and those that in both organisms predict disease onset and survival.