Healthy lifespan

It’s time to take care of the most important thing you have, your health! Call it ‘healthy lifespan’, ‘successful aging’, ‘healthy aging’, or whatever does the trick for you, the point is the same. It’s about minimizing your chances of getting diseases while aging, to maintain the most amount of energy and youthfulness in your years.

Our team is very interested to know what factors associate with healthy aging, because with more research, we might find these to actually end up being causal to healthy aging. Our approach is generally to use biological age to find factors associated with decelerated aging. Our work using a biological aging score from movement patterns identified fiber, magnesium, and vitamin E as nutritional factors most associated with decelerated aging [1]. In other work, thanks to collaborations with the University of Maastricht, we found how NAD+ holds the strongest association to human aging health (in the muscle) [2,3]. We also studied how exercise or just sitting less influences your metabolic health relative to sedentary life [3]. Together, we continue the search for factors that can causally decelerate aging, which basically just means that we want to promote health while we get older.

Curious to know more about how to have a healthy lifespan? Some of these blogs may be of interest to you:

References (* indicates equal contribution and # indicates correspondence). For an extended reference list see the about page.

  1. McIntyre RL, Rahman M, Vanapalli SA , Houtkooper RH, Janssens GE#. Biological Age Prediction From Wearable Device Movement Data Identifies Nutritional and Pharmacological Interventions for Healthy Aging. Front. Aging, 2021July. doi.org/10.3389/fragi.2021.708680
  2. Janssens GE#, Houtkooper RH, Hoeks J. NAD+to assess health in aging humans. Aging (Albany NY). 2022 Aug 6;14(15):5962-5963. doi: 10.18632/aging.204220. Epub 2022 Aug 6. PMID: 35939337; PMCID: PMC9417223.
  3. Janssens GE, Grevendonk L, Perez RZ, Schomakers BV, de Vogel-van den Bosch J, Geurts JMW, van Weeghel M, Schrauwen P, Houtkooper RH & Hoeks J. Healthy aging and muscle function are positively associated with NAD+abundance in humans.Nature Aging 2022. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43587-022-00174-3
  4. Remie CME*, Janssens GE*, Bilet L, van Weeghel M, Duvivier BMFM, de Wit VHW, Connell NJ, Jörgensen JA, Schomakers BV, Schrauwen-Hinderling VB, Hoeks J, Hesselink MKC, Phielix E, Houtkooper RH, Schrauwen P. Sitting less elicits metabolic responses similar to exercise and enhances insulin sensitivity in postmenopausal women. Diabetologia. 2021Sep 12;1-12. doi: 10.1007/s00125-021-05558-5. Online ahead of print.