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  • Perspective
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To promote healthy aging, focus on the environment

Nature Aging volume 3, pages 1334–1344 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

To build health equity for an aging world marked by dramatic disparities in healthy lifespan between countries, regions and population groups, research at the intersections of biology, toxicology and the social and behavioral sciences points the way: to promote healthy aging, focus on the environment. In this Perspective, we suggest that ideas and tools from the emerging field of geroscience offer opportunities to advance the environmental science of aging. Specifically, the capacity to measure the pace and progress of biological processes of aging within individuals from relatively young ages makes it possible to study how changing environments can change aging trajectories from early in life, in time to prevent or delay aging-related disease and disability and build aging health equity.

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Fig. 1: The environment and aging.
Fig. 2: Structural inequalities in environmental drivers of aging.
Fig. 3: Direct and indirect pathways of environmental impacts on aging.
Fig. 4: Epigenetic clock measures of biological aging.

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Acknowledgements

D.W.B. is supported by National Institute on Aging grants R01AG073402, R01AG066887 and R01AG061378 and is a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Child Brain Development Network. A.A.B. is supported by the National Institutes of Health (P30ES009089). We gratefully acknowledge D. Prada and C. Eckstein for their work on the figures in the manuscript.

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  1. Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center and Department of Epidemiology, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, New York, NY, USA

    Daniel W. Belsky

  2. Department of Environmental Health Sciences, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, New York, NY, USA

    Andrea A. Baccarelli

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D.W.B. and A.A.B. wrote the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Andrea A. Baccarelli.

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D.W.B. is listed as an inventor of DunedinPACE, a Duke University and University of Otago invention licensed to TruDiagnostic.

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Belsky, D.W., Baccarelli, A.A. To promote healthy aging, focus on the environment. Nat Aging 3, 1334–1344 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43587-023-00518-7

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