Strength & Mobility
The bathroom scale cannot tell the difference between losing fat and losing the tissue that keeps you out of a care home. That distinction gets more consequential every decade.
Nutrition After 50
The official figure has not changed since the 1980s, but the research underneath it has. Here is what the evidence supports now, and what the supplement aisle would rather you believed.
Strength & Mobility
Balance is a trainable skill that most people stop practising in their forties and only think about after the first fall. It responds quickly — but only to the right kind of practice.
Brain & Memory
The supplement industry has produced a great deal of confident advertising about brain health and remarkably little convincing data. The interventions with real evidence behind them are duller, cheaper and harder.
Heart & Metabolic
Guidelines have shifted twice in a decade, and the right number for an older adult depends on more than age. What matters is frailty, standing blood pressure and how many other drugs are in the box.
Preventive Care
Prescriptions accumulate over decades and are almost never subtracted. By the mid-seventies, the drugs themselves have become one of the commoner causes of hospital admission.
Living Well
The claim that isolation is as harmful as smoking gets quoted constantly and is more slippery than it sounds. The underlying finding is real, and the useful part is what distinguishes loneliness from being alone.
Strength & Mobility
The bathroom scale cannot tell the difference between losing fat and losing the tissue that keeps you out of a care home. That distinction gets more consequential every decade.
Strength & Mobility
Balance is a trainable skill that most people stop practising in their forties and only think about after the first fall. It responds quickly — but only to the right kind of practice.
Strength & Mobility
A device costing less than a pair of shoes predicts mortality, disability and hospital outcomes better than most things on a blood panel. What it is really measuring is the interesting part.
Brain & Memory
The supplement industry has produced a great deal of confident advertising about brain health and remarkably little convincing data. The interventions with real evidence behind them are duller, cheaper and harder.
Brain & Memory
Waking at four in the morning is not necessarily insomnia, and treating it as though it were is how a lot of older people end up on drugs that make them fall over.
Brain & Memory
Losing your keys is not a symptom. Losing the ability to work out what keys are for is a different matter. The clinical distinction rests on function, not on how often you forget.
Nutrition After 50
The official figure has not changed since the 1980s, but the research underneath it has. Here is what the evidence supports now, and what the supplement aisle would rather you believed.
Nutrition After 50
Most of the supplement aisle is selling insurance against a risk you do not have. Three or four have a defensible case in older adults, and one of them has genuinely changed with age.
Nutrition After 50
Almost everyone eats less fibre than they should, and the consequences compound with age. But the commonest cause of constipation in older adults is not the diet at all.
Heart & Metabolic
Guidelines have shifted twice in a decade, and the right number for an older adult depends on more than age. What matters is frailty, standing blood pressure and how many other drugs are in the box.
Heart & Metabolic
Cardiorespiratory fitness declines about 10 per cent a decade, and accelerates after 70. It is also among the strongest predictors of mortality ever measured — and one of the more responsive to training.
Heart & Metabolic
For secondary prevention the case remains good at any age. For primary prevention in the over-75s, the trials that would answer the question have mostly not been done.
Preventive Care
Prescriptions accumulate over decades and are almost never subtracted. By the mid-seventies, the drugs themselves have become one of the commoner causes of hospital admission.
Preventive Care
Screening has an intuitive logic — find it early, treat it early — that holds for some conditions and quietly fails for others. Age changes the arithmetic in both directions.
Preventive Care
A T-score of −2.4 sounds alarming and a fracture risk of 8 per cent sounds reassuring, and they can describe the same person. Here is how to read the numbers you are given.
Living Well
The claim that isolation is as harmful as smoking gets quoted constantly and is more slippery than it sounds. The underlying finding is real, and the useful part is what distinguishes loneliness from being alone.
Living Well
Sense of purpose predicts mortality, disability and even the rate at which people use preventive healthcare. The effect survives adjustment, and it is more practical than it sounds.
Living Well
Age itself is a poor predictor of driving safety. Specific capacities are much better ones — and losing a licence carries real health costs that are rarely weighed against the risk.
Independent, research-backed reporting on healthspan — strength, cognition, sleep, bone density, nutrition and the medicine of getting older well. We publish explanatory articles rather than news, which means an article here is written to still be useful a year from now. Every piece is bylined, sourced and read by an editor before it appears — the full process is set out in our editorial policy.
