Long life is the main risk factor for disease, but chronological age does not always tell us exactly how much we have aged. Lifestyle or genetics can speed up or slow down the process, and medicine is looking for ways to accurately measure it. Today the journal Nature publishes the results of a work led by Tony Wyss-Coray from Stanford University (USA), which managed to measure the specific aging of the main organs of the body to determine whether this changes over time worsen. a faster rate than normal.
The system used is a blood test, which would make it relatively easy to determine health status. In the study published today, which analyzed the blood plasma of more than 5,000 people, it was observed that about 20% of those over 50 had accelerated organ aging and 1.7% of the people analyzed had two or more more. This accelerated aging, which is sometimes associated with specific diseases of each individual organ, is associated with an increase in the risk of death by 20 to 50%, although not all organs have the same impact on health. Accelerated aging of the heart increased heart failure by 250%, and faster deterioration of the vascular system or brain was associated with a higher likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s in the future, as they demonstrated using patient samples 15 years ago to monitor carry out aging processes.
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To assess the aging of various organs, the levels of almost 5,000 proteins in the blood of almost 1,400 people, mostly over 40 years old, were evaluated. They identified all the proteins that were most common in specific organs and selected 858 that could be associated with each organ and that, when found in excessive amounts, warned of accelerated aging of that organ. Using machine learning, they trained an algorithm that selected the proteins that had the greatest connection to the aging of each organ. Although there was, as expected, some synchrony between the aging of each individual’s organs, there were also important differences that showed that some organs were particularly affected by the passage of time.
The aim of this type of work is to detect early on that something is wrong with a particular organ in order to be able to take preventive measures at an early stage. This test detected this accelerated aging when there were no symptoms yet, but which, follow-up data showed, would increase the risk of disease and death in the future. Accelerated brain aging increased the risk of death by 180%, and kidney aging was associated with a higher risk of diabetes and high blood pressure.
“The opportunity that this type of research opens up for us is to precisely determine the rate of aging of each organ and therefore its decline. With this we could guide a precise preventive medicine that prescribes specific care and monitoring for each person based on the observation of the biological age of each organ,” says Manuel Collado, scientific researcher at CNB-CSIC at the Health Research Institute Santiago de Compostela to Science Media Center Spain.
This potential tool for precision diagnosis of accelerated aging is currently being studied in groups around the world. In April this year, a team from the University of Melbourne in Australia published a study in Nature Medicine that explained how the accelerated aging of some organs ultimately affects the aging of other organs, increasing the risk of death. “Deviations from expected age-related decline may be detected in some organs years before disease diagnosis,” they wrote. According to the authors, these variations predict mortality even when chronological age, disease burden and other risk factors are taken into account, and could be used to identify individuals who experience accelerated aging of some organs before disease onset. Disease that may benefit from interventions to slow the aging of certain organs or body systems.
Wyss-Coray, the author of the study published today by Nature, has been searching blood for more than a decade to find the differences between a young and an old organism. After discovering that transfusing blood from young mice to older mice improved the function of many organs, including the brain, he founded Alkahest. This company, now owned by the Spanish pharmaceutical company Grifols, is testing the effects of transfusing plasma from young people to older people with Alzheimer’s. In light of the latest findings, Wyss-Coray believes that identifying specific proteins in each organ that best predict accelerated aging can be used to develop drugs that slow it down.
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