The human pathome shows sex and tissue specific aging patterns

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Authors: Michael Ben Ezra, Jonas Bach Garbrecht, Nasya Rasmussen, Marta Cortés Mediavilla, Indra Heckenbach, Michael Angelo Petr, Daniela Bakula, Laust Hvas Mortensen, Morten Scheibye‐Knudsen
Cited by: 1
References: 50

Abstract

Little is known about tissue-specific changes that occur with aging in humans. Using the description of 33 million histological samples we extract thousands of age- and mortality-associated features from text narratives that we call The Human Pathome (pathoage.com). Notably, we can broadly determine when post-development aging starts at the organism and tissue level, indicating a sexual dimorphism with females aging earlier but slower and males aging later but faster. We employ unsupervised topic-modeling to identify terms and themes that predict age and mortality. As a proof of principle, we cross-reference these terms in PubMed to identify nintedanib as a potential aging intervention and show that nintedanib reduces markers of cellular senescence, reduces pro-fibrotic gene pathways in senescent cells and extends the lifespan of fruit flies. Our findings pave the way for expanded exploitation of population text datasets towards discovery of novel aging interventions.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Biomedical Text Mining and Ontologies Epigenetics and DNA Methylation Mental Health via Writing

Publication details

Journal / source
npj Aging
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Volume
12
Issue
1
Pages
23–23
Publication date
30 January 2026
Language
EN