It is an automatic behavior when you meet someone new: unconsciously, you make up physical signals to gauge how old they are. Facial wrinkles, gray hair, an unstable walk: these all indicate an older age.
Often these guesses are fairly accurate and researchers trying to replicate the internal age calculator to find out how old people are – not chronologically, but organic.
In a new one paper Published in Nature MedicineTony Wyss-Coray, professor of neurology at Stanford University and director of Phil and Penny Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience, and his colleagues reporting on a blood test that they have developed that can determine the ‘biological age of a person:’ A number of more than your parent will be more accurate that your parent.
The test is looking for sets of proteins that are unique to 11 organ systems, and each of these groups of proteins offers a window on how healthy the corresponding organ is. All in all, they can help predict which people will probably develop certain diseases in the coming decade or so.
Based on the analysis, the brain seems to be a particularly strong predictor of not only Alzheimer’s disease, but generally a long service life. Researchers discovered that people with brains older than their chronological age had the tendency to die earlier than people with brains younger than their real age.
Build a biological clock
Scientists have long been interested in studying the gap between the chronological age of a person and their biological age, because the difference reflects how quickly someone can get older – a process influenced by factors such as illness, smoking, diet and other lifestyle factors. Various calculations such as those in the current study-so-combined “biological clocks” existence to determine the biological era of a person, but proving their reliability and accuracy has been a challenge.
To generate a stronger scientific basis for a biological clock, Wyss-Coray began with the fact that organs in the body tend to produce specific proteins that are unique to them. His hypothesis was that following how these proteins change over time can indicate how healthy the organ is and how well it functions. That is what blood tests do with your annual physical: they give a glimpse into the status of the heart, liver and other organs, so that doctors have an idea of how well they work and whether they change over time.
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Wyss-Coray brought that idea to a higher level by studying 3,000 proteins in 45,000 people, age 40 to 70 who gave blood samples to the British biobank. These proteins were identified as unique for one of the 11 different organs: fatty tissue, artery, heart, immune tissue, intestine, kidney, liver, lung, muscle and pancreas. He also developed a machine learning model that registered levels of these proteins in both healthy people and people with diseases. Because the samples were linked to the age of people, Wyss-Coray could also map out which levels of proteins were associated with which ages.
When he did, he came up with the biological era of a certain organ in a certain person, which he could then compare with their chronological era to get a feeling that people get older faster. The 20 proteins associated with the brain turned out to be good proxies for calculating the overall biological age of a person.
“If I have a measurement [of the brain proteins] From every random person I can try to fit it and say: “This person must be close to this old,” he says. “It gives an estimate of how old that person is, or how old that brain is.”
A new look in aging
Wyss-Coray is not sure why the brain is such a strong stand-in for the rest of the organ systems, but it is possible that the brain reflects the overall disease or damage status of the body and other organ systems in one way or another, or that the brain is a central orchestrator of different organs and view their function and lifetime.
Because the study followed people who provided samples for 15 to 17 years, Wyss-Coray was also able to investigate how biological age correlated with death. Those whose biological brain age was younger than their chronological age had a 40% lower risk of dying during the study compared to normal agents. People with older brains not only had more chance of shorter lives, but also three times more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease – a level comparable to having one copy of the genetic risk factor Apoe4 – than normal agents.
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The ‘older’ the organs of a person, the higher their risk of death; Having two to four outdated organs increased the risk of dying during the study by more than biliof, and having eight or more old organs increased the risk. “There is a step-by-step increase in the risk of dying,” says Wyss-Coray. “That’s pretty striking.”
Although is sobering, the results are also hopeful, he says. Unlike genes, proteins can be adjusted and the health of organs can be changed with medicines, lifestyle behavior or both. People in the study that took one of the six medicines or supplements – cod -liver oil, glucosamine, ibuprofen, multivitamins, the hormone treatment premarin or vitamin C – had at least two organis systems that were biologically younger than their chronological age. People who did not smoke or drunk drank and who regularly slept well had the tendency to have younger organs.
“In the future and to a certain extent, even now there are hopefully some ways to intervene,” says Wyss-Coray. “It is similar to bringing the garage to the garage once a year, when they use a computer diagnostics to show if all the different parts of your car are in order. What is nice here is that this may give people something in their hands that they can change.”
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