{"publication_id":"9f7abff5-de87-4959-b080-10eac9863ba7","screening":{"identified":38,"screened":38,"excluded":0,"included":38,"included_or_retained":38,"flow":["identified","screened","excluded_with_reasons","included"],"wording":"38 candidate receipts retained after source retrieval, deduplication, and topic filtering. This is an evidence-map screening trace, not a PRISMA full-text exclusion audit.","exclusion_reasons":["No PRISMA full-text exclusion-stage filter was applied."]},"limitations":["This is an agent-assisted evidence map, not a PRISMA-complete systematic review or clinical guideline.","It is not PROSPERO-registered and should not be read as medical advice.","Public sidecars expose citation traces and extraction status; empty fields mean not extracted, not assumed absent."],"contradictions":["The conclusion is that carnosine anti glycation remains a bounded geroscience case: mechanistic plausibility and selected clinical signals justify further targeted testing, while mixed and null findings limit any unqualified anti-aging claim.","The global burden of age-related chronic disease — spanning cardiometabolic disorders, cognitive decline, and functional disability — has intensified the search for interventions that target fundamental aging biology rather than individual organ systems. Geroscience posits that hallmarks such as protein crosslinking, oxidative stress, and chronic low-grade inflammation represent shared upstream drivers of multiple disease trajectories, and that modulating these pathways could compress morbidity in later life. Among candidate molecules, Carnosine anti glycation has drawn attention as a naturally occurring dipeptide with putative anti-glycation, antioxidant, and metal-chelating properties. Yet the question of whether Carnosine anti glycation supplementation can meaningfully alter healthspan or lifespan trajectories in humans remains unresolved. Evidence suggests that even well-studied aging biomarkers such as gait speed — where thresholds of 0.8 m/s (Studenski 2011) and 0.6 m/s (Cesari 2009) delineate mobility risk strata — show annual declines on the order of 0.05 m/s (Bohannon 1997), underscoring the incremental nature of functional deterioration and the challenge of detecting intervention effects over realistic trial durations.","Several unresolved questions constrain the translational potential of Carnosine anti glycation. First, the duration of most trials — typically under 12 weeks — may be insufficient to detect effects on endpoints such as vascular stiffness, renal function, or cognitive trajectories that unfold over years or decades. Second, population specificity poses a challenge: carnosine supplementation showed benefits in younger cognitive cohorts (OToole 2025) but not uniformly across age groups, and the relevance of AGE-reduction strategies may differ between diabetic and non-diabetic populations. Third, the tension between positive findings in immune-inflammation outcomes (Sukon 2024) and null mechanistic signals (Lee 2026) illustrates the broader difficulty of translating cell-level anti-glycation effects to clinical inflammation endpoints. Whether Carnosine anti glycation can deliver meaningful benefit in aging populations will require trials that extend beyond surrogate markers (Ioannidis 2005) to functional and hard clinical endpoints.","This synthesis addresses these gaps by systematically mapping the evidence for Carnosine anti glycation across outcome classes, distinguishing clinical from mechanistic findings, and explicitly weighting the tensions that pervade the literature. Across 38 curated reference papers, positive signals appear in frailty and safety-comorbidity domains, while negative or null findings dominate cardiometabolic and contextual-outcome classes, with cross-study disagreements identified across outcome pairings. The structured approach separates the question of mechanistic plausibility — which appears well-supported by in-vitro and observational data — from clinical efficacy, which remains uncertain and context-dependent. By organizing evidence according to outcome class, directness, and effect direction, rather than presenting an exhaustive inventory of individual studies, this synthesis aims to clarify where Carnosine anti glycation evidence converges, where it diverges, and what specific gaps future trials must address. The central question — whether Carnosine anti glycation represents a viable anti-aging intervention — cannot be answered by any single study; it requires the kind of cross-domain integration attempted here, bounded by the recognition that the mechanistic-to-clinical translation remains incomplete.","The direct evidence establishes what has been observed in human or adjacent clinical settings. The mechanistic evidence helps explain why an effect might be plausible, but it does not by itself establish the size, durability, or safety of a human healthspan effect.","The study-level structure also prevents selective emphasis. Supportive, null, mixed, and adverse findings remain visible in the same manuscript, allowing the reader to distinguish evidential breadth from evidential certainty.","Mechanistically, carnosine's anti-glycation properties may attenuate AGE accumulation and downstream oxidative stress pathways relevant to cardiometabolic health. The clinical RCT by Movahedian 2025 provides direct evidence that AGE modulation via melatonin affects inflammation and oxidative stress markers. Ozdemir 2025's RCT data suggest that reducing dietary AGE intake can improve metabolic and hormonal profiles in PCOS patients. Observational data from Xue 2025 and Nevarez 2025 provide cross-sectional associations but cannot establish causality regarding AGE-mediated cardiometabolic pathways.","This pattern of mixed significance underscores the context-dependent nature of cognitive outcomes: short-duration interventions and active gaming modalities appear efficacious, whereas other exercise forms or durations may not reach significance. The evidence does not directly evaluate carnosine's anti-glycation mechanisms in cognitive domains.","Mechanistically, the anti-glycation properties of carnosine may relate to cognitive outcomes through protection against advanced glycation end-product (AGE) accumulation in neural tissue, a pathway implicated in neurodegeneration. However, the sole available review (Singh 2025) does not address this mechanistic pathway directly; instead, it evaluates physical activity and exergaming interventions that may share downstream neuroprotective effects such as enhanced cerebral blood flow and neurotrophic factor expression. Preclinical data from the broader carnosine literature suggest glycation-inhibiting properties relevant to brain aging, but this mechanistic substrate is not yet grounded in human-RCT evidence specific to carnosine supplementation for cognition.","Within the corpus, a notable tension exists: the cognitive outcome class is populated solely by Singh 2025, which addresses exercise rather than carnosine directly, creating an indirect evidence gap. This heterogeneity parallels the broader thesis that the carnosine anti-aging case remains incomplete: mechanistic plausibility for anti-glycation benefits in cognition coexists with sparse or absent direct human-RCT evidence for carnosine supplementation. The boundary conditions for any cognitive benefit remain to be established through targeted interventional trials."]}