Aging in the air we breathe: mechanisms and consequences of air pollution exposure for biological aging.
Abstract
Air pollution is the leading environmental cause of disease burden worldwide and is increasingly recognized as a potent driver of accelerated biological aging. Rather than acting through organ-specific toxicity alone, air pollutants appear to affect the fundamental hallmarks of aging itself, including oxidative stress, chronic inflammation, epigenetic dysregulation, telomere attrition, mitochondrial dysfunction, and cellular senescence. The pollutants of greatest concern are fine and ultrafine particulate matter (PM
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Research summary
The paper posits that air pollution accelerates biological aging by targeting fundamental hallmarks such as oxidative stress and epigenetic dysregulation, rather than causing isolated organ damage. This review is relevant because it connects environmental exposures to the root mechanisms of aging, although as a descriptive review of known pathways, it offers only incremental conceptual synthesis rather than novel mechanistic discovery or therapeutic intervention.
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