Published Review Explores Exposomic Determinants of Heart Failure in Older Adults

A newly published scientific review outlines how environmental exposures intersect with core biological aging pathways to accelerate heart failure, suggesting a shift toward systemic longevity-focused preventative strategies.

A review published in Current Heart Failure Reports by Hahad et al. details how the exposome—the collective total of lifelong environmental and behavioral exposures—interacts with biological aging to drive heart failure (HF) in older adults.

The authors emphasize that traditional cardiovascular risk factors do not fully account for HF burden, noting that exposures to air pollution, noise, temperature extremes, toxic metals, and chemicals significantly influence incidence and prognosis.

Mechanistically, the review highlights that environmental stressors and cardiac aging converge on shared pathways, including cellular senescence, mitochondrial dysfunction, impaired autophagy, genomic alterations, and chronic inflammation ('inflammaging').

This convergence suggests that therapeutic strategies addressing fundamental hallmarks of aging could help protect cardiovascular health against environmental challenges, supporting a systems-level, life-course approach over traditional organ-centered treatments.

The theoretical alignment between environmental stressors and biological aging mechanisms could broaden the therapeutic rationale for platforms targeting cellular senescence, mitochondrial dysfunction, or autophagy.

If clinical models validate this systems-level framework, developer platforms addressing these core aging hallmarks may find new positioning in preventative cardiovascular medicine.

Watch for future epidemiological or preclinical studies evaluating whether specific longevity-focused therapies can mitigate the cardiovascular damage caused by model environmental stressors like air pollution.