Pharmacological Effects and Molecular Mechanisms of Lignans in the Treatment of Alzheimer's Disease.

A substantial proportion of the global residential building stock is now several decades old, and much of it was designed and constructed under standards that paid limited attention to the fine-grained spatial safety conditions of everyday domestic life. In China, rapid urbanization since the 1980s produced an immense inventory of residential units—apartment blocks, urban dwellings, and rural homes—that were built to meet acute housing shortages, with design priorities centered on basic shelter, floor-area efficiency, and construction speed rather than on occupant safety in daily activities such as ambulation, transfer, reaching, and bathing [,]. A significant share of this stock remains in active use today, yet its spatial configurations, dimensional relationships, and fixture installations were never systematically evaluated against the ergonomic and safety requirements of occupants across the life course []. As these buildings age, their inherent spatial deficiencies—narrow doorways, abrupt level changes, absence of support fixtures, inadequate illumination, and accumulations of household clutter in constrained circulation paths—compound into latent environmental hazards. The urgency of assessing and retrofitting this existing housing stock is magnified by the concurrent demographic reality of population aging: as of the end of 2024, the population aged 60 years and over in China reached 310.31 million, constituting 22.0% of the total national population, while those aged 65 and over numbered 220.23 million, or 15.6% []. Projections suggest that by 2050, the proportion aged 65 and above could exceed 26% []. National policy frameworks have explicitly endorsed a model of “home-based eldercare as the foundation, community-based support as the main support, and institutional care as a supplement” [], which elevates the residential environment from a mere container of domestic life to a fundamental unit of the aging-in-place support system. The convergence of an aging building stock and an aging population thus creates a dual challenge: a vast inventory of homes whose latent spatial hazards were never designed to accommodate the diminished functional capacities of their elderly occupants. The ecological theory of aging provides a robust conceptual framework for understanding why the spatial deficiencies of older housing stock become critical safety hazards for aging occupants. This theory posits that an individual’s functional ability is not solely a product of their intrinsic physiological and cognitive capacities but is co-determined by the interaction between these capacities and the demands of their surrounding environment []. As individuals age, they experience a progressive decline in key functional domains, including musculoskeletal strength, balance control, gait stability, visual acuity (particularly contrast sensitivity and dark adaptation), and reaction time []. These physiological changes effectively lower the threshold at which conventional spatial configurations and environmental features become hazardous. A residential environment that was once navigable and supportive can, in the context of diminished capacity, transform into a high-risk field for accidents. Empirical data underscores this vulnerability: over 70% of falls among older adults occur within the home or its immediate vicinity []. These incidents are rarely attributable to a single, isolated defect but are instead the result of a complex interplay between an individual’s declining abilities and specific environmental stressors. High-risk spatial units where this person-environment mismatch frequently manifests include thresholds and level changes, narrow circulation paths, wet areas like bathrooms and kitchens, and locations lacking adequate support for transfers and ambulation. Crucially, many of these hazardous spatial conditions are not random occurrences but are systematic features of housing built before age-friendly design principles were widely adopted, underscoring that the precise identification and characterization of environmental hazards in the existing building stock is not merely an architectural concern but a critical public health imperative, serving as the essential first step towards effective intervention and the restoration of a safe, supportive living environment. Despite the clear need for systematic residential safety evaluation, current practices remain heavily reliant on manual, subjective methodologies that are fundamentally ill-suited to the scale and complexity of the challenge. The dominant approach involves trained professionals—such as occupational therapists, social workers, or building inspectors—conducting on-site visits to perform visual inspections against standardized checklists or screening tools like HOME FAST or HAP []. While these methods can be effective in controlled settings, they suffer from several critical limitations. First, they are highly dependent on the expertise, experience, and s