Poorer people suffer greater declines in physical function as they age

Older individuals in England and Canada showed persistent wealth gaps in abilities as they aged

PLOS

Facebook

XLinkedIn
MessageWhatsAppEmail

 

image: 

Associations between wealth and functional ageing trajectories for gait speed, grip strength, and lung function in ELSA and CLSA. Lines represent predicted trajectories estimated from the mixed-effects models. Note that the y axes have been inverted for consistency of presentation across outcomes. Mixed-effects models included age, age2, birth year, as well as sex, race, height (gait speed and grip strength only), wealth, and their interaction with linear age as covariates. ELSA=English Longitudinal Study of Ageing; CLSA=Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging; FEV=Forced Expiratory Volume.

view more 

Credit: Schrempft S, et al., 2026, PLOS Medicine, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

In England and Canada, socioeconomic inequalities are associated with differences as people age, with less wealthy people showing reduced mobility and function compared to their wealthier peers, according to a study published August 13th in the open access journal PLOS Medicine by Stephanie Schrempft from Geneva University Hospitals, Switzerland, and colleagues.

Physical function decreases with age, but there is significant variation in the rate of decline across populations. Wealth is known to have an influence on health and disability, but there are few studies comparing different countries, which would help to identify the policies and structures that contribute to inequalities in health and aging. To address this gap, the authors of this study compared data from two long-term aging studies, analyzing 8,511 people in the English Longitudinal Study of Aging and 22,605 in the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging, all between the ages of 50 and 85. The researchers examined the association between wealth and different physical functions, including walking speed, grip strength, lung function, hearing, self-reported trouble with daily activities, such as dressing, bathing, and eating, and more.

The authors found that people with less wealth tended to have lower levels of function and suffered larger declines in mobility and ability to perform daily activities as they aged. The wealth inequalities were more evident in England than in Canada and persisted even after the authors adjusted for chronic conditions, weight status and behaviors like smoking. The differences were as large as a 15-year difference in apparent aging, with the poorest 60-year-old in England having the walking speed of the wealthiest 75-year-old. Women with the least wealth also had more difficulties with mobility and daily activities than men in the same socioeconomic group, but had better lung function. While the results are correlational and could not take into account childhood factors or access to private healthcare, the authors note that policies for healthy aging should focus on people with less wealth, and that broad structural changes are needed to reduce these inequalities.

Silvia Stringhini (senior author) notes, “What struck us most was how much larger the wealth gaps were in England than in Canada. For something as basic as walking speed, the least wealthy were functionally older by roughly 15 years in England versus 9 in Canada. Our study cannot tell us exactly why two countries with universal healthcare and similar income inequality diverge so much, but it tells us the difference is real and substantial. We are now undertaking further cross-country comparative work to better understand which structural factors are driving these gaps.”

“We were surprised by how much larger the wealth gaps in functional ageing were in England than in Canada, and the structural reasons behind that difference are exactly what our ongoing comparative research aims to uncover.”

Stephanie Schrempft (first author) adds, “Wealth gradients in health are nothing new, but almost no one has tracked how functional ageing actually unfolds over time across countries. By following older adults in England and Canada side by side, we could see that being less wealthy does not just mean worse health on average, it means losing physical independence faster as you age.”

“One of the things I found most interesting was that the disadvantage of low wealth was not the same for women and men. The least wealthy women struggled more with mobility and daily activities yet had better lung function than the least wealthy men. That kind of nuance gets lost when you treat the disadvantaged as a single group, which is why we took an intersectional approach that is still rare in ageing research.”

In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available paper in PLOS Medicine: https://plos.io/4wbNOyC 

Citation: Schrempft S, Vereecke S, Nehme M, Schmidt KL, Guessous I, Kobor MS, et al. (2026) Socioeconomic inequalities in functional ageing trajectories in England and Canada: A comparative longitudinal cohort study. PLoS Med 23(8): e1004833. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1004833

Author countries: Switzerland, Canada, United Kingdom

Funding: see manuscript

---

Journal

PLOS Medicine

DOI

10.1371/journal.pmed.1004833 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

People

 

Rate of climate change affects stability of the AMOC

Faster warming could trigger a tipping point which slower warming might avoid

Utrecht University, Faculty of Science

Facebook

XLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

 

image: 

The current in the Atlantic Ocean now (left) and in the future when the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is further weakened by global warming.

view more 

Credit: IPPC AR6 WGI chapter 9

For several  years, climate scientists have shown that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) could come to a halt if the world warms too much. New research by researchers from Utrecht University shows that this picture is incomplete: the pace of warming also determines whether the AMOC stays stable. The study was published in the scientific journal Nature Climate Change.

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, is the system of ocean currents that transports warm water from the tropics northward. It plays a major role in redistributing heat across the planet, and helps keep the climate in Western Europe relatively mild.

Scientists have long suspected that this ‘heat engine’ of the Atlantic Ocean could reach a tipping point. This means that the system would shift from its present-day strong state to a much weaker state within decades. Such a tipping event could be triggered by external influences, such as an increasing amount of meltwater from the polar regions, or global warming itself.

Temperature threshold
Until now, the AMOC was thought to tip and collapse around +4°C of warming. Researchers at the Institute for Marine and Atmospheric research Utrecht now show that there's more to the story. “Our results show there is not necessarily a fixed temperature beyond which the AMOC inevitably collapses," says lead author René van Westen. "The stability of the circulation depends on how fast the climate is changing."

Slow versus fast warming
To investigate how the rate of climate change affects the strength of the AMOC, Van Westen and his colleagues ran a climate model twice. In their simulations, they used a gradually increasing amount of atmospheric CO2, but at different speeds. In one simulation, CO2 concentrations rose slowly (0.5 ppm per year); in the other, much faster (2.5 ppm per year), comparable to today's rate.

Under slow warming, the AMOC remained stable well beyond +4°C, and it did not collapse even at +5°C of warming. Under fast warming, the AMOC collapsed already at around +2°C. “We deliberately looked at a scenario that is much slower than what we're experiencing today,” explains co-author Reyk Börner. “That allowed us to isolate the effect of the warming rate alone, independent of how warm it eventually gets.”

Resilience
The explanation lies in how the ocean is able to adjust to change. “Under slow warming, the entire ocean, from the surface down to its deepest layers, has time to gradually reorganize and adapt to the changing conditions,” says co-author Henk Dijkstra, professor of Dynamical Oceanography. “Under faster warming, the ocean simply can't keep up.”

Flying off the road
According to the researchers, the critical warming rate lies around 0.3°C per decade, a pace the world is already approaching. Van Westen compares it to driving a car: “If you're driving toward a wall, it makes sense to steer around it. To do that, you need to brake, otherwise you fly off the road. When it comes to global warming, the world is still pressing extra hard on the accelerator right now.”

In perspective
The same research group has published on AMOC stability several times in recent years, each time from a slightly different angle.

• In 2024, the group showed that an increasing amount of meltwater in the North Atlantic makes the AMOC more unstable. This mechanism had long been suspected, but this study was the first to demonstrate it in a modern, complex climate model. The results confirmed that there is a critical meltwater threshold beyond which the AMOC becomes unstable. However, this threshold is unrealistically high, meaning that the present-day AMOC is unlikely to become unstable through this contribution alone. That study did not account for global warming or its pace.
• A later study examined different global warming scenarios, and concluded that the AMOC would reach a tipping point around 2060 under both an intermediate- and high-emission scenario. In those simulations, the tipping point was reached at approximately 2.5°C of global warming.
• The new study explains why the results of such studies can differ and why estimated temperature thresholds vary between climate models and emissions scenarios. While the AMOC has a critical threshold for meltwater, no universal temperature threshold exists. Instead, AMOC stability depends on the rate of warming: the faster the climate warms, the more vulnerable the AMOC becomes, whereas slower warming allows it to remain stable under substantially higher levels of global warming.

Climate policy
The slower the warming, the more time the Atlantic Ocean has to adapt, and the lower the near-term risk of an AMOC collapse. That has implications for how we think about climate policy: much current policy, including the Paris Agreement, is aimed at limiting the eventual peak temperature. This is sometimes based on so-called overshoot pathways: temporary global warming past that limit, on the assumption that future technology could later bring the temperature back down.

 

AMOC strength for a slow (+0.5 ppm yr⁻¹, black) and fast (+2.5 ppm yr⁻¹, blue) increase in atmospheric CO2. The yellow star marks the onset of the AMOC collapse under fast warming, at around +2°C in this model.

Credit

Courtesy of the researchers

---

Journal

Nature Climate Change

DOI

10.1038/s41558-026-02730-w 

Method of Research

Computational simulation/modeling

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Failure to track a stable AMOC state under rapid climate change

Article Publication Date

13-Aug-2026

 

Poison centers see nearly 400% increase in liver injury calls

Acetaminophen top driver of dangerous spike

University of Virginia Health System

Facebook

XLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

 

image: 

Christopher Holstege, MD, led a UVA Health study that found calls to poison centers involving liver injuries caused by medications, supplements, alcohol and other substances jumped nearly 400% between 2000 and 2024.

view more 

Credit: UVA Health

Calls to poison centers involving liver injuries caused by medications, supplements, alcohol and other substances jumped nearly 400% between 2000 and 2024, according to a new study from UVA Health. 

Researchers led by UVA’s Christopher P. Holstege, MD, looked at liver damage called by “xenobiotics,” foreign substances not naturally found in the human body. This category includes drugs, food additives, alcohol and environmental pollutants. 

More than 80% of the liver injuries required inpatient care, with the majority of cases stemming from medications. Acetaminophen was the most frequently implicated substance. 

“Xenobiotic-induced liver injuries reported to U.S. poison centers have steadily increased,” said Holstege, director of UVA Health’s Blue Ridge Poison Center. “The public should be aware of potential liver injury with various substances that are readily available to consumers.”

Liver Injury Causes

Holstege and his colleagues identified a total of 220,160 cases of xenobiotic liver injury over the 24 years reviewed. Population-adjusted exposure rates skyrocketed from 10.9 per million people to 52.9 per million people. 

The researchers found that exposures from acetaminophen-containing drugs decreased significantly – by 60%-85% – after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration imposed a cap on the amount of acetaminophen allowed in combination prescription products. By contrast, potentially harmful exposures to acetaminophen by itself increased steadily over the 24-year period, indicating that regulatory action successfully reduced liver damage from combination products, while acetaminophen alone remains a leading contributor to liver injuries reported to poison centers. 

Females had higher rates of acetaminophen-associated liver injury than males, and suspected suicide was the most common reason for exposure in both sexes, the study found. 

"Liver injuries reported to poison centers has increased substantially over the past 25 years, with acetaminophen emerging as a growing contributor,” Holstege said. “Our study findings highlight the important role poison centers play in toxico-surveillance.”

Alcohol was a distant second in the top causes of liver injuries. This was seen more frequently in men than women, but injuries increased in both sexes during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The researchers also identified increases in liver injuries caused by stimulants and street drugs, herbal and dietary supplements and environmental toxins, but these were far less common than the injuries caused by acetaminophen and alcohol.

“Medications should always be taken as directed by clinicians and per pharmaceutical label instructions,” Holstege said. “Care must also be taken in consuming emerging substances that are unregulated. More studies are warranted to determine if specific populations are more at risk of liver injury.”

UVA Health’s Blue Ridge Poison Center is available to answer questions about potential poison exposures 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The center can be reached at 1.800.222.1222. There is no charge for the service.

Findings Published 

The researchers have published their findings in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology. The research team consisted of Eleanor Blair Towers, Holstege, Scott Schmalzried and Rita Farah. The scientists have no financial interest in the work.

To keep up with the latest medical research news from the University of Virginia School of Medicine and UVA’s new Paul and Diane Manning Institute of Biotechnology, bookmark the Making of Medicine blog at https://makingofmedicine.virginia.edu. 

---

Journal

Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

People

COI Statement

The scientists have no financial interest in the work.

 

One-step synthesis of catalysts that turn carbon dioxide into useful methane

Flame-assisted spray pyrolysis offers a scalable approach to produce high-performance nickel–cerium oxide catalysts

Institute of Science Tokyo

Facebook

XLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

 

image: 

This innovative flame-based technique produces high-quality catalysts and is easily scalable for industrial-level production.

view more 

Credit: Institute of Science Tokyo

A simple flame-synthesis method can produce highly active catalysts for converting carbon dioxide into methane, as reported by researchers from Science Tokyo. The team used flame-assisted spray pyrolysis to manufacture nickel–cerium oxide catalysts with finer nanoparticles and more active sites than conventional methods. These catalysts achieved outstanding methanation performance while remaining suitable for large-scale production, offering a practical route toward carbon-neutral fuel technologies.

As the world works towards achieving carbon neutrality, finding practical ways to reuse captured carbon dioxide (CO2) has become an important goal. One promising approach is to convert waste or atmospheric CO2 into methane (CH4), a valuable fuel and chemical feedstock, through a process known as methanation. Because methane can be stored and transported using existing gas infrastructure, it could help reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.

However, making CO2 methanation efficient and affordable remains a major challenge. Although scientists have developed exceptional catalysts, many of the best-performing ones require complex manufacturing methods that are costly, time-consuming, and difficult to scale for industrial production. Unless catalyst synthesis can be simplified, CO2 methanation is unlikely to have a meaningful impact on carbon emissions.

To address this challenge, a research team led by Associate Professor Tsuyoshi Nagasawa from Institute of Science Tokyo, Japan, including graduate student Kosei Okada from the same institute, in collaboration with Designated Associated Professor Maki Nakamura from the Nagoya University, Japan, and researchers from the Japan Synchrotron Radiation Research Institute (JASRI), SPring-8, Japan, has developed a simple one-step method for producing high-performance catalysts for CO2 methanation. Their findings, made available online on July 8, 2026, and will be published in Volume 428 of the journal Fuel on January 15, 2027, demonstrate how this innovative manufacturing approach can produce excellent nickel–cerium oxide (Ni/CeO2) catalysts while remaining suitable for large-scale production.

The researchers focused on a technique called flame-assisted spray pyrolysis (FASP), a one-step process in which a solution containing the catalyst ingredients is sprayed into a high-temperature flame. As the droplets pass through the flame, they rapidly form catalyst particles without requiring the multiple preparation steps used in conventional methods. Using a diffusion-flame FASP system, the team synthesized Ni/CeO2 catalysts and compared them with catalysts produced by the widely used impregnation method.

Detailed structural analyses using advanced techniques like field-emission scanning electron microscopy, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, and X-ray absorption fine structure revealed clear advantages for the flame-synthesized catalysts. They consisted of much finer and more uniformly distributed nanoparticles, providing a larger surface area and better dispersion of nickel. Moreover, they had more oxygen vacancies, more catalytically active reduced nickel species, and more contact points between nickel and cerium oxide, all of which help drive the methanation reaction.

These structural improvements translated directly into better catalytic performance, as the FASP-derived catalyst achieved higher CO2 conversion rates and methane selectivity throughout the tested temperature range. “At 300 °C, flame-produced catalysts achieved a methane production rate of 81.3 μmol/(gcat·s), representing high-level performance among the reported Ni/CeO2-based methanation catalysts despite a relatively low nickel loading,” says Nagasawa.

Considering the simplicity of the proposed one-step FASP process, the team believes this method could help solve the manufacturing bottleneck that has held back CO2 methanation. “By combining simple manufacturing with excellent catalytic performance, this technology has strong potential to support the industrial deployment of large-scale CO2 utilization and synthetic methane production in future carbon-neutral energy systems,” concludes Nagasawa.

In the near future, such scalable technologies will hopefully play an important role in transforming captured carbon into valuable resources.

 

***

 

About Institute of Science Tokyo (Science Tokyo)
Institute of Science Tokyo (Science Tokyo) was established on October 1, 2024, following the merger between Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) and Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech), with the mission of “Advancing science and human wellbeing to create value for and with society.”

---

Journal

Fuel

DOI

10.1016/j.fuel.2026.140563 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

One-step synthesis of Ni/CeO2 catalyst with fine structure for CO2 methanation by flame-assisted spray pyrolysis

Article Publication Date

15-Jan-2027

 

New brain map links mice and primates

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Facebook

XLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

 

image: 

A comparison of leaf-level structures in sample cortical regions of the mouse and marmoset brain.

view more 

Credit: Mitra lab/CSHL

Most neuroscience research still runs on mice, even though much of what applies to mice does not hold up in humans. Marmosets have emerged as a bridge between species. However, comparing the brains of mice and marmosets runs into a chicken-and-egg problem. Scientists need to know which part of one brain matches the respective region of the other, but almost every brain map draws those areas differently.

In a new study, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Professor Partha Mitra and colleagues built the first cross-species map to systematically link mouse and marmoset brain regions.

“It’s the kind of problem that nobody wants to address, because it’s hard,” Mitra says. Comparing genomes across species is relatively straightforward. DNA aligns letter by letter. But brain circuits vary even within one species. Compounding the problem, research teams have built different brain atlases that divide the same mouse brain differently.

Mitra’s team noticed that experts often argue over grouping small structures into larger ones. For instance, some atlases group several brain regions into a single subcortical structure called the amygdala. In other atlases, the amygdala superstructure does not exist, and the component regions are instead grouped into the cerebral cortex. Perhaps surprisingly, most atlases agree on the smallest identifiable chunks of the brain, called “leaf-level regions.”

Mitra’s team matched leaf-level regions between mice and marmosets first, then built the bigger picture from there. “Think of states and cities,” Mitra says. “State boundaries may shift, but at the lowest level, people tend to agree about cities. New York City might be called New York in one atlas and New Amsterdam in another, but everyone at least agrees that a city exists here.”

The team picked through more than 100 published studies, manually matching only the smallest reliably identified parcels. They found a direct, one-to-one match for 43% of mouse brain regions and 47% of marmoset regions. They also found that the cerebral cortex has been subdivided into far more specialized regions in marmosets than in mice.

The result isn’t a final answer, but a shared reference point other labs can now build upon. “This was an intermediate stepping stone,” Mitra says. “Having this kind of map is helpful for asking how different regions of the brain are connected and then comparing those connections.”

Why go through all that trouble? Many drugs that work in mice fail in humans. As Mitra puts it, “We are not mice. We are not even large mice.” Marmosets, however, are evolutionarily much closer to humans. So, a more accurate comparison of mice and marmosets could make for a more reliable journey from lab results to healthcare applications and patient outcomes.

In the meantime, it should also help us better understand who we are—both as a species and as different-minded individuals.

---

Journal

Communications Biology

DOI

10.1038/s42003-026-10716-9