This lemur is named Nemesis and lives on the Duke Lemur Middle. Credit score: Susan R. Miller
What can lemurs inform us about irritation and ageing, aka “inflammaging” in people? That is the query Elaine Guevara, a organic anthropologist who research the evolution of life historical past and ageing in primates, got down to perceive.
In newly printed analysis on age-related irritation in ring-tailed and sifaka lemurs, Guevara found that maybe we must always rethink the inevitability of inflammaging in people. The work is printed within the Journal of Comparative Physiology B.
Though comparable in some ways, ring-tailed and sifaka lemurs present variations in life pacing and lifespan, making helpful comparisons. As a result of lemurs and people are primates and share a standard ancestor that lived tens of millions of years in the past, they provide helpful insights into human evolution.
Her findings, she stated, had been “surprising.”
“Contrary to our predictions, neither species showed age-related change in either marker of oxidative stress. Neither lemur species exhibited age-related change in inflammation; if anything, contrary to our prediction, ring-tailed lemurs showed marginal declines in inflammation with age,” Guevara stated.
This discovering, according to just a few current research of different non-human primates, means that lemurs keep away from the phenomenon of “inflammaging” extensively noticed in people.
The research reveals inflammaging shouldn’t be a common function of primates, pointing to some variations which may recommend it seems it is not even a common function of people, based on Christine Drea, a professor of evolutionary anthropology who was one of many researchers working with Guevara.
What’s inflammaging?
As we get older, low-grade continual irritation units in, which in flip may cause well being issues reminiscent of coronary heart illness, strokes, diabetes, most cancers and osteoarthritis.
Why inflammaging will increase with age in people, what causes it and the way it may be prevented are solutions to questions that may unlock important info to assist people reside longer and more healthy lives.
Gathering knowledge from lemurs
Drea stated the staff first needed to discover a strategy to measure oxidative stress, which might be present in blood, urine and saliva. They settled on urine.
“Our role at the beginning was planning, designing, brainstorming, comparing and getting these samples,” stated Drea, who has labored with the Duke Lemur Middle since 1999. The Lemur Middle doesn’t permit analysis that can hurt the animals.
The subsequent step, says Guevara, is to conduct comparable analysis with lemurs within the wild.
“There are a lot of good reasons to think that aging can be quite different in captivity and in the wild, and that in itself is informative for evaluating the degree to which human inflammation is intrinsic versus environmental,” she stated.
Within the meantime, Guevara says this research serves as step one in unraveling the query of why people are affected by inflammatory-related and age-related circumstances and discovering methods to deal with them.
With a quickly ageing world inhabitants, “these insights are essential for mitigating disability and improving quality of life in later years,” she stated.
Extra info:
Elaine E. Guevara et al, Comparability of age-related irritation and oxidative stress in two lemur species, Journal of Comparative Physiology B (2025). DOI: 10.1007/s00360-025-01619-y
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Duke College
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Lemurs present no age-related irritation, difficult assumptions about human ageing (2025, July 9)
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