🧠 Rethinking Aging: What If Functional Decline Isn’t Just a Matter of Time?

A new international project — HealthAge — is making waves in the science of aging. By studying people, mice, and even killifish, researchers are tracking how we lose our strength, memory, and resilience over time. But they’re not just looking at diseases.

Instead, they focus on something called Intrinsic Capacity (IC) — a concept from the World Health Organization that measures our physical and mental potential as we age.

The HealthAge project uses advanced tools — from MRI scans to gene sequencing — to find early signs of decline in areas like mobility, vitality, cognition, and psychological well-being. The goal? To detect the “bends before the breaks,” and find ways to intervene before people lose their independence.

But here’s the twist: while the HealthAge study brilliantly measures what is changing, it doesn’t quite explain why.

🔍 Enter ERM: Exposure-Related Malnutrition

This is where a newer concept, called Exposure-Related Malnutrition (ERM), may offer the missing piece.

ERM doesn’t refer to starving or being underweight. Instead, it describes a silent energy drain in the body — where chronic stress, inflammation, toxic exposures, and unmet metabolic demands lead to a mismatch between what the body needs and what it can sustain.

This mismatch forces the body into difficult trade-offs. Over time, it shifts energy away from repair, cognition, and regeneration just to keep the lights on. The result? Exactly the kinds of changes tracked by HealthAge:

• Muscle loss and fatigue (vitality)

• Slowed thinking and forgetfulness (cognition)

• Poor mobility and reduced strength (locomotion)

• Mood issues and burnout (psychological well-being)

• Hearing and vision problems (sensory resilience)

🧬 ERM as the Engine Behind IC Decline

While HealthAge captures the symptoms, ERM may explain the cause.

Imagine your body as a city. IC measures how well that city runs — public transport, emergency services, utilities. But ERM reveals whether there’s enough funding, staff, and energy to keep it going. Chronic underfunding (stress, toxins, poor sleep, nutrient gaps) doesn’t break the city overnight — but it leads to slow decay.

HealthAge offers an extraordinary platform to measure aging in real time. If its powerful multi-species data is interpreted through the lens of ERM, we might finally be able to map not just when people decline, but why — and how to stop it.

💡 What This Means for the Future

This fusion — HealthAge's functional framework + ERM's energetic explanation — could help us:

• Predict who is at risk long before disease appears

• Develop targeted resilience-building therapies

• Create new biomarkers for early detection

• Redefine “healthy aging” as more than luck or genetics

In other words, aging may not just be about time ticking away — but about energy slipping through our fingers.

And with the right lens, we might be able to catch it.

Guyonnet, S., Hooper, C., Bischoff-Ferrari, H. A., Parini, A., Santin, Y., Pradère, J.-P., Dray, C., & Vellas, B. (2025). HealthAge: Evaluation of intrinsic capacity changes in humans, mice, and killifish to explore the biology of aging. GeroScience. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11357-025-01718-2

#Intrinsic Capacity, #Exposure-Related Malnutrition (ERM), #Healthy Aging, #Bioenergetic Trade-Offs, #Functional Decline