Having lived a long time is the main risk factor for suffering from diseases, but chronological age does not always tell us precisely 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 magazine Nature publish the results from a work led by Tony Wyss-Coray, from Stanford University (USA), which has managed to measure the specific aging of the body’s main organs, to detect if any are deteriorating at a greater rate than normal.
The system used is a blood test, something that would make it relatively easy to apply to know the state of health. In the study published today, in which the blood plasma of more than 5,000 people was analyzed, it was observed that around 20% of those over 50 years of age had an organ aging at an accelerated rate and 1.7% of people analyzed had two or more. This accelerated aging, which is partly associated with specific diseases of each organ, is related to an increase in the risk of death of between 20% and 50%, but not all organs have the same weight on health. Accelerated aging of the heart increased heart failure by 250%, and a more rapid deterioration of the vascular system or the brain was related to a greater likelihood of suffering from Alzheimer’s in the future, as they were able to verify with patient samples. taken 15 years ago to monitor aging processes.
To evaluate the aging of different organs, the levels of nearly 5,000 proteins in the blood of almost 1,400 people, mostly over 40 years old, were evaluated. They identified all the proteins that appeared most frequently in specific organs and selected 858 that could be associated with each organ and that, when found at excessive levels, warned of accelerated aging of that organ. Using machine learning (machine learning), they trained an algorithm that selected the proteins that had the greatest relationship with the aging of each organ. Although, as might be expected, there was some synchrony between the aging of each individual’s organs, there were also important differences that showed some organs being particularly affected by the passage of time.
The objective of this type of work is to know well in advance that something is not going well with a specific organ in order to take preventive measures well in advance. This test detected this accelerated aging when there were no symptoms yet, but which, as the follow-up data showed, would increase the risk of disease and death in the future. Accelerated aging of the brain increased the risk of death by 180% and that of the kidneys was associated with a greater risk of diabetes and hypertension.
“The opportunity that this type of research opens up for us is to precisely establish the aging rate of each organ and, therefore, its deterioration. With this, we could guide precision preventive medicine that would prescribe specific care and follow-up for each person based on the observation of the biological age of each organ,” he points out. Manuel Collado, scientific researcher at the CNB-CSIC at the Health Research Institute of Santiago de Compostela Science Media Center Spain.
This potential tool for precision diagnosis of accelerated aging is being investigated in groups around the world. In April of this year, a team from the University of Melbourne, in Australia, published a study in Nature Medicine which explained how accelerated aging of some organs ends up affecting the aging of others and increases the risk of dying. “Deviations from the expected age-related decline can be detected in some organs years before disease diagnosis,” they wrote. According to the authors, these deviations predict mortality, even when chronological age, disease burden and other risk factors are taken into account, and could be used to identify individuals with accelerated aging of some organs before the onset of the disease. disease that could benefit from interventions to slow the aging of specific organs or body systems.
Wyss-Coray, the author of the study published today Nature, has been searching in the blood for more than a decade to find the differences between a young organism and an old one. After observing that transfusing blood from young mice to older ones improved the functioning 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 into older people with Alzheimer’s. Regarding the latest results, Wyss-Coray believes that the identification of specific proteins in each organ that best predict accelerated aging can be used to create drugs that slow it down.
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