The global population for individuals aged 65 and older is predicted to reach 2.2 billion, greater than the number of children under the age of 18. There is still a lot unknown about the process of aging. This experiment provides more understanding on “inflamm-aging”, which is a state of mild and persistent systemic inflammation that occurs in all cells, tissues and organs during aging. We aimed to look at the cellular and mitochondrial changes that occur in the cornea with age. RT-qPCR was conducted using TaqMan primer probe sets to quantify inflammation markers, damage-associated molecular patterns (DAMPs) and cell health markers. There were no differences in the expression of inflammation genes and DAMPs between the aged and the young mice. Two cell health markers, Mitochondrial transcription factor A (Tfam) and Aquaporin-3 (Aqp-3) were expressed significantly higher in the young mice compared to the aged mice. Previous literature shows that Tfam plays a role in mitochondrial biogenesis and Aqp-3 in corneal proliferation and migration. Thus, the results of this experiment suggest that young mice corneas have lower inflammation levels than aged mice, as predicted. This abstract was presented at the American Physiology Summit 2026 and is only available in HTML format. There is no downloadable file or PDF version. The Physiology editorial board was not involved in the peer review process.
Bhatt et al. (Fri,) studied this question.
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