Publications by authors named "Anastasios Papadam"
Article Synopsis
- Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is a leading cause of central vision loss, with age, genetics, and smoking as key risk factors.
- Machine learning was used to predict biological age across different organ systems and assess their association with AMD, revealing that most organ systems in AMD patients showed accelerated ageing, particularly the immune system in younger males.
- Interestingly, AMD patients had slower ageing in their liver compared to controls, especially in females, and genetic risk scores for AMD correlated with faster ageing in most organs, highlighting the complex relationship between AMD and biological ageing.
The retina is uniquely enriched in polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), which are primarily localized in cell membranes, where they govern membrane biophysical properties such as diffusion, permeability, domain formation, and curvature generation. During aging, alterations in lipid metabolism lead to reduced content of very long-chain PUFAs (VLC-PUFAs) in the retina, and this decline is associated with normal age-related visual decline and pathological age-related macular degeneration (AMD). (Elongation of very-long-chain fatty acids-like 2) encodes a transmembrane protein that produces precursors to docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and VLC-PUFAs, and methylation level of its promoter is currently the best predictor of chronological age.
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