The one-child policy, the social engineering carried out by the Chinese government to contain the birth rate, is taking its toll. China's population is declining and aging while the number of people living alone is increasing. and socially isolated. In 2025, China lost approximately 3.39 million inhabitants, and the birth rate fell by 17%, to its lowest level since records began. Efforts to stimulate birth rates and marriage are proving ineffective, and it is estimated that by 2030 there will be more than 200 million single-person households.

A physician and anthropologist, Dr. Vânia de la Fuente-Núñez led the WHO's campaign against ageism and in 2021 was one of the authors of the UN's first state of the art report. She has written The age trap (Ediciones B) and runs a consultancy to advise governments and entities in the fight against age stereotypes and encourage them to promote policies to healthy aging.

While the genocide in Gaza continues unstoppable despite citizen protests and useless international and monarchical policies; while Trump spits his venom at the UN and this organization grows increasingly weaker, despite having demonstrated its ineffectiveness for decades; while the anti-immigration rhetoric continues to convince and fails to convince any possibility of preventing people from having to move illegally around the world; while corruption weakens democracies and authoritarian regimes can subjugate their nations without problems; while nature continues to be an infinite good that can be destroyed; while everyone continues to ignore the hell in which Afghan women live; while drones and AI fly over our heads to make them explode; while beauty and empathy barely have space in the news of the day; while problems pile up on our tables and solutions disappear, science studies how to live longer.

In Catalonia, by 2025, 20% of the population will be over 65 years old. According to the latest projections from the Statistical Institute of Catalonia, the population aged 65 and over in Catalan municipalities will increase by 94% between 2024 and 2034. Therefore, not only will there be more population, but it will also be older, with a trend towards aging in 9 out of 10 municipalities. Aging is one of the collective challenges that today's societies must face.

The Catalan supergrandmother She never smoked or drank alcohol. She didn't diet either, but she survived two wars and an exile, with the nutritional deficiencies that this entails. In 117 years, Maria Branyas from Olotina never became seriously ill, and not even COVID-19 caused any symptoms. Before she died in August 2024, she learned that her cells were a decade younger than her birth date. The person who was the longest-lived in the world She knew she was special in the eyes of the scientific community and agreed to be studied by Manel Esteller, head of the cancer epigenetics group at the Josep Carreras Leukemia Research Institute (IJC), and Eloy Santos, a researcher in aging and cancer epigenetics at the center itself. It was a mystery to everyone why this woman had such an extreme life expectancy and, furthermore, with a good quality of life and good health.

Dermatologists make it clear: there is no such thing as a healthy tan. "A tan is always a consequence of the damage caused by ultraviolet radiation to our skin, and therefore, the best thing we can do to care for our skin is to prevent it," explains Francesc Alamon, a dermatologist at Hospital Clínic. Prevention involves adequate sun protection, physical protection with clothing, hats, and sunglasses, as well as avoiding the hours of greatest sunlight, which "is key to mitigating the effects the sun can have on our skin," adds Alamon. Photoaging and many of the spots and wrinkles that appear on the skin, especially on the face, are a consequence of the photoexposure we have accumulated over the years.

Education and schooling improve cognitive function throughout life, but they do not influence the rate of brain decline. Nature Medicine has published the research in which workers from the Guttmann Institute and the University of Barcelona (UB) participated, analyzing Longitudinal data from more than 170,000 people from 33 countries. The authors conclude that education from childhood is necessary, but also policies that promote brain activity throughout life.

Let's imagine the case of a middle-aged person who, one day, while searching through their phone, comes across a selfie they took a year earlier. Horrified, they realize that this image doesn't correspond to the one they see every day in the mirror: they can now count more wrinkles and much more gray hair. How can it be, if a relatively short time has passed, that they seem to have aged so quickly? The explanation should be that their body has experienced a more acute decline than usual. Indeed, that's what an article published in the magazine Nature Aging He claimed that it happens to all of us at least twice in our lives.

Artificial intelligence and everything that can come from it is a topic that worries me. It makes me a little anxious to admit it, because it makes me feel older and out of place. I still remember when I took the first courses to introduce myself to the world of the internet and search engines, and I often had that same feeling.

Maria Branyas, who died a year ago at the age of 117 in the Olot residence where she had lived for two decades, being then the oldest person in the world, she was fortunate to inherit a privileged genome that, according to researchers, made her cells "feel" and "behave" like younger cells, with a biological age of about seventeen years less. She also had a microbiota typical of a child. This is the conclusion of the study led by Manel Esteller, head of the Epigenetics Group of the Josep Carreras Institute, professor of genetics at the University of Barcelona and the world's leading authority on epigenetics and the study of aging and cancer. Numerous research teams of great international prestige have participated, the vast majority of them Catalan, and it is the most exhaustive and complete research ever carried out on a supercentenarian (those who live more than 100 years). The results, which the ARA has accessed for the first time, are revealing.

Some 90-year-olds are more active than other 30-year-olds. But there are also others who, at 80, can hardly perform any activities without the support of someone else. Therefore, what are the keys to ageing in a healthy and enviable way? This is answered by the psychologist and researcher of the Envelliment, Cultura i Salut Research Group (Ageing, Culture and Health) (UdG) Pilar Monreal; the Catalan Society of Geriatrics and Gerontology geriatrician and vice-president, Jordi Amblàs; and the nurse and director of the Les Vetes nursing home in Salt, Àngels Teixidor.

There are currently more than 900 million people over the age of 65 in the world and in 2050 there could be 2,000 million, explains Francesc Posas, director of the Institute of Biomedical Research, a pioneering institution in launching a programme on ageing. Much has been said about the socio-economic challenge this poses, both in terms of pensions and care for these people, but perhaps it is good to stop seeing it just as a problem and consider it for what it is, one of the great milestones of humanity in the last two centuries. It is clear from the graph that accompanies the opening of the dossier that we dedicate today to research on longevity and ageing. In 1800, the life expectancy of the European population was 33.3 years. Granted, many children died and this brought the average down a lot, but the truth is that very few reached old age and most of them died before they had reached what we now consider to be the end of youth. Hygienic measures and the introduction of sewage pipes, sewerage as it is known today, brought about a revolution, and by 1900 life expectancy had risen to 42.7 years, almost ten more. And the average rose still further when penicillin was discovered around 1930, which together with the first vaccines managed to reduce infant mortality. In 1950, however, life expectancy in Europe was still 62 years, and since then it has risen to almost 80 years (78.6) in 2019.