Epilepsy remains a major global health challenge, with its burden increasingly shaped by population aging and unequal access to care. Now, researchers show that although epilepsy mortality has declined substantially, 87.9% of associated disability-adjusted life years are concentrated in low- and lower-middle-income countries. In China, regional, urban-rural, and healthcare-tier disparities persist, while stroke-related epilepsy and aging populations are reshaping disease patterns and creating new demands for prevention, diagnosis, and long-term care globally.

AI-based “tissue clocks” can estimate the biological age of human organs from histological images, researchers at the CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Network Medicine (LBI-NetMed) at the University of Vienna showed. By analyzing more than 25,000 tissue samples across 40 tissue types, their study reveals that organs age at different rates throughout life and that these changes can even be detected from blood samples. The findings, published in Nature Medicine (DOI: 10.1038/s41591-026-04566-5), provide a new framework for understanding aging and may open new avenues for disease monitoring and early diagnosis.