Mitochondrial quality control in human ageing and longevity.

Mitochondrial quality control is vital for healthy ageing, and strategies like NAD+ may support this process, though specific evidence is not detailed in the review.

Summary and findings

This review discusses mitochondrial quality control (MQC) mechanisms and their roles in human ageing and longevity. It highlights the importance of MQC in maintaining cellular metabolism and immune function, particularly under stress conditions. The review also explores potential therapeutic strategies, including NAD+, but does not provide specific numeric findings.

Abstract

Mitochondria play central roles in cellular metabolism and in key processes such as inflammation, stress response, cell death and signalling. Mitochondrial quality control (MQC) mechanisms continuously monitor organelle integrity and function, and repair or eliminate damaged mitochondria to replace them with newly formed, healthy organelles. MQC is particularly important under metabolic or environmental stress conditions. Failure of MQC paves the way to chronic diseases, such as diabetes, metabolic syndromes and immunosenescence. This Review summarizes our current understanding of MQC biology in the context of healthy human longevity. We explore the regulation of MQC in physiological conditions and explain how the dysregulation of MQC in ageing negatively impacts systemic metabolism and immune function. We discuss emerging therapeutic strategies-such as NAD⁺, AMPK activators and caloric restriction-that maintain a robust MQC to improve metabolic resilience and illustrate how preclinical and clinical studies can leverage MQC as a potential gerotherapeutic target.

Key findings

• Not reported in abstract.

Limitations

• Not reported in abstract.

Elsewhere in the NAD+ (Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide) corpus