Ageing of the cardiovascular system is associated with frailty and various life-threatening diseases. As global populations grow older, age-related conditions increasingly determine healthspan and lifespan. The circulatory system not only supplies nutrients and oxygen to all tissues of the human body and removes by-products but also builds the largest interorgan communication network, thereby serving as a gatekeeper for healthy ageing. Therefore, elucidating organ-specific and cell-specific ageing mechanisms that compromise circulatory system functions could have the potential to prevent or ameliorate age-related cardiovascular diseases. In support of this concept, emerging evidence suggests that targeting the circulatory system might restore organ function.
A large consortium of aging scientists from around the world recently published a Roadmap article in Nature Review Cardiology delving into the organ-specific and cell-specific mechanisms that underlie ageing-related changes in the cardiovascular system. This effort raises unanswered questions regarding the optimal design of clinical trials, in which markers of biological ageing in humans could be assessed. It is intended to provide guidance for the development of gerotherapeutics, which will rely on the technological progress of the diagnostic toolbox to measure residual risk in elderly individuals. A major challenge in the quest to discover interventions that delay age-related conditions in humans is to identify molecular switches that can delay the onset of ageing changes. To overcome this roadblock, future clinical trials need to provide evidence that gerotherapeutics directly affect one or several hallmarks of ageing in such a manner as to delay, prevent, alleviate or treat age-associated dysfunction and diseases.
Several EU-METAHEART members took part of this effort including Luca Liberale, Kostantinos Stellos, Gemma Vilahur, Simon Sedej, Judith Haendeler, Marinos Kallikourdis, Pasquale Maffia, Lina Badimon, Kimon S. Stamatelopoulos, and Mahmoud Abdellatif .
Read more here https://www.nature.com/articles/s41569-025-01130-5