As personal essays on heartbreak, grief and emotional sensitivity circulate widely, and as educators in Italy call for mandatory affective education after a deepnude case, researchers are quietly advancing the biological understanding of human ageing. At the European Society of Human Genetics congress in Goteborg, a team from Leiden University Medical Center presented a rare variant in the CGAS gene, found in families where middle-aged members develop cardiometabolic disease on average 13 years later than their peers. Separately, a published study from the University of Queensland, drawing on 160,000 adults in the UK Biobank, mapped 325 taste and smell genes against 140 foods and found that a preference for onion flavour correlates with lower risks of hypertension and type 2 diabetes.

The CGAS variant appears to reduce chronic inflammation without impairing acute immune response, a mechanism that may extend healthspan—the years lived free of chronic disease. The finding emerged from genome analysis of 212 sibling groups in the Leiden Longevity Study, which narrowed the search to roughly 350 genes and identified 12 rare protein-altering variants. The Queensland team used Mendelian randomization to strengthen causal inference, validating results against the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children. Both lines of work suggest that genetic variation in sensory and immune pathways shapes how individuals age and what they choose to eat, though the CGAS research remains at the genetic-association stage and is now moving into an animal model, the short-lived killifish.

Viewed from Oxford, demographer Saul Newman offers a sharp methodological critique: extreme-longevity records are often built on faulty paperwork. He points to a Greek audit showing that at least 72 percent of centenarian records were cases of pension fraud, where families concealed deaths to continue collecting benefits. Such errors, he argues, accumulate with age and distort the data used to calibrate epigenetic clocks. Meanwhile, at the University of Chicago, neuroscientist Emily Rogalski’s ongoing superager study has shown that some individuals over 80 retain memory comparable to 50-year-olds, with larger cerebral cortex and hippocampus volumes, and can resist cognitive decline even when Alzheimer’s pathology is present post-mortem.

The next factual milestones are already in motion. The Leiden group expects initial killifish results within months, which will test whether the CGAS variant extends lifespan and tissue health in a living vertebrate. Newman’s call for physical age-validation methods—radiocarbon dating, amino acid analysis in teeth and eye tissue—may prompt a re-examination of longevity databases. The food-genetics study opens a path toward personalised dietary advice, though clinical applications remain distant. For now, the science of ageing is advancing on two fronts: uncovering protective biology while confronting the fragility of its own foundational data.