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Whole-genome sequencing, transcriptome-wide association and fine-mapping analyses in over 7,000 individuals with critical COVID-19 are used to identify 16 independent variants that are associated with severe illness in COVID-19.

A global network of researchers was formed to investigate the role of human genetics in SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 severity; this paper reports 13 genome-wide significant loci and potentially actionable mechanisms in response to infection.

Using metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis-driven hepatocellular carcinoma mouse models, an ATP citrate lyase inhibitor reduces tumour burden and enhances efficacy of current standards of care.

The chemoattractant receptor GPR15 directs the homing of T cells to the colon; however, GRP15 expression differs in the effector and regulatory T cell subsets of humans versus those of mice. These findings have profound implications for the potential targeting of GRP15 for therapeutic intervention.

The advantage of living in cities compared with rural areas with respect to height and BMI in children and adolescents has generally become smaller globally from 1990 to 2020, except in sub-Saharan Africa.

Whether multimorbidity accelerates brain Aβ deposition in humans remains largely unknown. Here, the authors demonstrate that higher self-reported multimorbidity burden predicts increased brain Aβ accumulation rates in the ADNI cohort.

How synovial fibroblasts activate cartilage degradation in arthritis is not well understood. Here, the authors identify an O-glycosylation program and glycosylated Calnexin in synovium’s edge fibroblasts as drivers of extracellular matrix degradation, highlighting potential therapeutic targets.

In CHIP, somatic mutations in a hematopoietic stem cell lead to a clonal subpopulation of blood cells. Here, the authors perform a CHIP meta-EWAS to establish its epigenetic features and age-related outcomes.

Analyses of clinical and genomic data from a cohort of 2,336 patients with pancreatic adenocarcinoma find that KRAS dosage gains are a hallmark of disease progression and are predictive of poor outcomes across different disease stages.

Increasing progranulin (PGRN) levels is a promising approach for treating frontotemporal dementia and other neurodegenerative diseases. Here Nicholson et al.show that the prosaposin (PSAP) locus is associated with plasma PGRN levels and demonstrate that PSAP can alter PGRN levels and its oligomerization.

Estimates from the Global Dietary Database indicated that 2.2 million new type 2 diabetes and 1.2 million new cardiovascular disease cases were attributable to sugar-sweetened beverages worldwide in 2020, with the highest burdens in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean.

From 1980 to 2018, the levels of total and non-high-density lipoprotein cholesterol increased in low- and middle-income countries, especially in east and southeast Asia, and decreased in high-income western countries, especially those in northwestern Europe, and in central and eastern Europe.

On 16 and 17 March 2021, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the National Institute of Aging convened a virtual workshop to discuss developments in SARS-CoV-2 research pertaining to immune responses in older adults, COVID-19 vaccines in both aged animals and older individuals, and to gain some perspective on the critical knowledge gaps that need addressing to establish scientific priorities for future research studies.

Inflammatory intestinal lesions are often hypoxic, which results in the stabilization and activation of hypoxia-inducible-factors (HIF). Here authors show that in a mouse model of colitis, HIF-2α is specifically stabilized in CD4+ type 1T helper (T_H1) cells, leading to the upregulation of miR-29a expression and suppression of T_H1 cell function, which pathway is potentially targetable for therapeutic purposes.

Contrary to the view that urbanization is a major driver of the global rise in obesity, the global increase in body-mass index is shown to be mostly due to increases in the body-mass indexes of rural populations.

Recent estimates of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) intake are generally unavailable. Here the authors show a global SSBs intake of 2.7 servings/week in 2018 in adults (range: 0.7 South Asia, 7.8 Latin America/Caribbean); intakes were higher among males, younger, more educated, and urban adults.

Association analyses in over 1 million individuals identify 535 new loci influencing blood pressure traits. The results provide new insights into blood pressure regulation and highlight shared genetic architecture between blood pressure and lifestyle exposures.

An analysis based on data from the Global Dietary Database shows mean animal-sourced food intakes among children and adolescents increased modestly from 1990 to two portions per day in 2018, but remain low in sub-Saharan Africa, India and Bangladesh.

Alzheimer’s disease has been associated with increased structural brain aging. Here the authors describe a model that predicts brain aging from resting state functional connectivity data, and demonstrate this is accelerated in individuals with pre-clinical familial Alzheimer’s disease.

Dietary quality is reported at the global, regional and national level across 185 countries. Though diet quality increased modestly since 1990 at the global level, in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa it did not improve. In some regions, children’s dietary quality is lower than that of adults.

Multi-ancestry genome-wide association analyses identify new risk loci for Parkinson’s disease, and fine-mapping and co-localization analyses implicate candidate genes whose expression is associated with disease susceptibility.

Mark Caulfield, Paul Elliott and colleagues use data from the UK Biobank to perform genome-wide association analysis for blood pressure traits. They identify and validate 107 novel loci and highlight new biological pathways for potential therapeutic intervention for hypertension.

Ros et al. show that the ER-resident chaperone calnexin (Cnx) and its partner ERp57 are trafficked to cell surface invadosomes and induce ECM degradation, promoting tumour invasiveness.

A study of the evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in England between September 2020 and June 2021 finds that interventions capable of containing previous variants were insufficient to stop the more transmissible Alpha and Delta variants.

The multicenter phase 3 trial of stem cell therapy for osteoarthritis (MILES) for knee pain revealed that cell therapies showed no significant difference in knee pain outcomes, compared to corticosteroid injections, 1 year following treatment.

Modeling analysis from the Global Dietary Database estimated that 70% of new global cases of type 2 diabetes are attributable to suboptimal intake of 11 dietary factors, with substantial differences in dietary risks across world regions and nations.

The interplay between amyloid and tau pathology in Alzheimer’s disease is still not well understood. Here, the authors show that amyloid-related increased in soluble p-tau is related to subsequent accumulation of tau aggregates and cognitive decline in early stage of the disease.

Sun et al. report human lifespan changes in the brain’s functional connectome in 33,250 individuals, which highlights critical growth milestones and distinct maturation patterns and offers a normative reference for development, aging and diseases.

Clonal hematopoiesis, often caused by mutations in DNMT3A and TET2, is associated with blood cancer and coronary artery disease. Here, the authors conduct an epigenome-wide association study, finding that clonal hematopoiesis caused by DNMT3A vs. TET2 mutations has directionally opposing changes in DNA methylation profiles, with both promoting stem cell self-renewal.

This study finds that sST2 is a disease-causing factor for Alzheimer’s disease. Higher sST2 levels impair microglial Aβ clearance in APOE4⁺ female individuals. A genetic variant, rs1921622, is associated with a reduction in sST2 level and protects against AD in APOE4⁺ female individuals.

In Alzheimer’s disease (AD) tau and neurodegeneration have complex regional relationships. Here, the authors show neuronal hypometabolism discordant with tau burden defines functional resilience or susceptibility to Alzheimer’s pathology via limbic/cortical axes. Susceptible groups have faster cognitive decline and evidence of non-Alzheimer’s pathologies.

Comprehensive analyses of 178 lung squamous cell carcinomas by The Cancer Genome Atlas project show that the tumour type is characterized by complex genomic alterations, with statistically recurrent mutations in 11 genes, including TP53 in nearly all samples; a potential therapeutic target is identified in most of the samples studied.

Alzheimer’s disease is heterogeneous in its neuroimaging and clinical phenotypes. Here the authors present a semi-supervised deep learning method, Smile-GAN, to show four neurodegenerative patterns and two progression pathways providing prognostic and clinical information.

A randomized trial in patients hospitalized with COVID-19 showed no benefit and potentially increased harm associated with the use of convalescent plasma, with subgroup analyses suggesting that the antibody profile in donor plasma is critical in determining clinical outcomes.

Systematic characterization of longitudinal tau variability in human Alzheimer’s disease using an unbiased subtyping algorithm reveals four trajectories of tau deposition with distinct clinical features.

The KL-VS haplotype of the Klotho gene has been associated with reduced risk of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. Here the authors show an association between the KL-VS haplotype and amyloid-dependent tau accumulation using PET data.

Samples of different body regions from hundreds of human donors are used to study how genetic variation influences gene expression levels in 44 disease-relevant tissues.

Myoepithelial cells prevent tumour growth and invasion in DCIS. Here, the authors show that p63 and TCF7 cooperate to regulate a transcription factor network for the maintenance of normal myoepithelial function and altered expression of these genes perturb myoepithelial function in DCIS to promote invasive progression.

The BIN1 SNP rs744373 is associated with higher CSF tau and phosphorylated tau levels. Here the authors show, using PET imaging, that this SNP is associated with tau accumulation in the brain as well as impaired memory in older individuals without dementia.

Tau accumulation is associated with disease progression in Alzheimer’s disease. Here the authors use resting state fMRI and tau-PET to demonstrate that baseline connectivity in Alzheimer's disease is associated with tau spreading.

Whether Alzheimer’s disease originates in basal forebrain or entorhinal cortex remains highly debated. Here the authors use structural magnetic resonance data from a longitudinal sample of participants stratified by cerebrospinal biomarker and clinical diagnosis to show that tissue volume changes appear earlier in the basal forebrain than in the entorhinal cortex.

Late-onset Alzheimer's disease (LOAD) is a complex multi-factorial disorder. Here, the authors perform a data-driven analysis of LOAD progression, including multimodal brain imaging, plasma and CSF biomarkers, and find vascular dysfunction is among the earliest and strongest altered events.

Brain-iron elevation is implicated in Alzheimer’s disease (AD), but the impact of the metal on disease outcomes has not been analysed in a longitudinal study. Here, the authors examine the association between the levels of ferritin, an iron storage protein, in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) of AD patients and show that CSF ferritin levels predict AD outcomes.