Reframing Longevity Medicine: Gerodiagnostics and Resilience Building from Preconception to Adulthood

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Summary of  Nature Health  https://doi.org/10.1038/s44360-026-00170-6 
Dr. Tzipora Strauss  et al.

Points

International researchers introduced the PROSPER consortium in Nature Health to advance longevity medicine by targeting biological aging mechanisms during preconception, fetal development, and early pediatric stages.
Intrinsic biological factors and exposome exposures including maternal nutrition, sleep, and environmental factors establish baseline resilience and govern long-term disease susceptibility across the human lifespan.
Current clinical practice remains heavily compartmentalized across obstetrics, pediatrics, and adult medicine, lacking unified biological frameworks to monitor and modulate early-life aging drivers proactively.
Standardized adult biological aging clocks prove inaccurate for developing children, underscoring the urgent necessity for international biobanks and pediatric-specific healthspan biomarkers.
Establishing proactive medical assessments up to one year before conception and throughout adolescence represents a crucial paradigm shift toward preventive lifelong health management.

Summary

Healthy longevity medicine from adult-focused interventions to preconception, intrauterine, and pediatric developmental stages. Traditional geroprotective strategies initiate intervention only after decades of accumulated molecular and cellular damage. However, mounting evidence indicates that intrinsic biological factors and external exposome exposures—including parental nutrition, sleep, and metabolic health—exert persistent, life-long impacts on intrinsic capacity, peakspan, and disease susceptibility through complex physical and neurocognitive pathways.

To address current clinical compartmentalization across obstetrics, neonatology, pediatrics, and adult medicine, an international research group proposed establishing the PROSPER (Pregestational and Pediatric Research for Optimal Healthspan and Early-life Resilience) consortium. The initiative seeks to build international infrastructure, aggregate global pediatric data, and establish biological banks to develop pediatric-specific gerodiagnostic tools. Existing adult biological aging clocks fail to reflect the dynamic physiological trajectories of growing children, creating a critical gap in early risk detection.

The proposed global framework emphasizes implementing prospective lifestyle, metabolic, and environmental monitoring starting up to 1 year prior to conception and extending through adolescent development. By integrating longitudinal biological tracking into routine clinical encounters, the consortium aims to test whether optimizing early-life variables can favorably modulate long-term biological aging trajectories. Clinicians must recognize early life as a pivotal window to build baseline physiological resilience and mitigate chronic disease risks before functional decline manifests in adulthood.

Link to the article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44360-026-00170-6

References

Strauss, T., Horvath, S., Kennedy, B. K., Walker, M., Shah, P. S., Zhavoronkov, A., Rando, T. A., & Bischof, E. (2026). PROSPER — a life-course consortium for biological ageing from preconception to adulthood. Nature Health, 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44360-026-00170-6