Similar to doing an MOT on a car, scientists believe they can run a blood test to check how fast a person's internal organs are ageing, and even predict which ones might soon fail. The Stanford University team say they can monitor 11 major body parts, including the heart, brain and lungs. They tried it on thousands of adults, mostly middle-aged or older. One in five reasonably healthy adults aged 50-plus might have at least one fast-ageing organ, the results suggest. And one to two in every 100 might have several organs that test older than their birthday years. While the idea of the check-up might be scary, it could be an opportunity to intervene and change course, the researchers say. Knowing which organs are in rapid decline could help reveal what health issues may be looming, the researchers say in the journal Nature. Organ age gap For example, an "old-for-its-time" heart increases the risk of heart failure, while a rapidly ageing brain might be more prone to dementia. In the study, having one or more organs ageing fast was linked with a higher risk of certain diseases and death over the next 15 years. The body parts they checked include: Brain Heart Liver Lung Intestine Kidney Fat Blood vessels (arteries) Immune tissue Muscle Pancreas The blood test looks for levels of thousands of proteins to give clues on which organs are ageing at different rates. The pattern of proteins detected appeared to be specific to particular organs. Researchers trained a machine-learning algorithm to make the predictions using lots of blood test results and patient data. One of the investigators, Dr Tony Wyss-Coray, explained: "When we compared each of these organs' biological age for each individual with its counterparts among a large group of people without obvious severe diseases, we found that 18.4% of those aged 50 or older had at least one organ aging significantly more rapidly than the average. "And we found that these individuals are at heightened risk for disease in that particular organ in the next 15 years." https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-67588640
Wow. Obvious point - would be so interesting to see if there were any trends that differ from healthy controls for pwme.
Organ aging signatures in the plasma proteome track health and disease Oh, Hamilton Se-Hwee; Rutledge, Jarod; Nachun, Daniel; Pálovics, Róbert; Abiose, Olamide; Moran-Losada, Patricia; Channappa, Divya; Urey, Deniz Yagmur; Kim, Kate; Sung, Yun Ju; Wang, Lihua; Timsina, Jigyasha; Western, Dan; Liu, Menghan; Kohlfeld, Pat; Budde, John; Wilson, Edward N.; Guen, Yann; Maurer, Taylor M.; Haney, Michael; Yang, Andrew C.; He, Zihuai; Greicius, Michael D.; Andreasson, Katrin I.; Sathyan, Sanish; Weiss, Erica F.; Milman, Sofiya; Barzilai, Nir; Cruchaga, Carlos; Wagner, Anthony D.; Mormino, Elizabeth; Lehallier, Benoit; Henderson, Victor W.; Longo, Frank M.; Montgomery, Stephen B.; Wyss-Coray, Tony Animal studies show aging varies between individuals as well as between organs within an individual, but whether this is true in humans and its effect on age-related diseases is unknown. We utilized levels of human blood plasma proteins originating from specific organs to measure organ-specific aging differences in living individuals. Using machine learning models, we analysed aging in 11 major organs and estimated organ age reproducibly in five independent cohorts encompassing 5,676 adults across the human lifespan. We discovered nearly 20% of the population show strongly accelerated age in one organ and 1.7% are multi-organ agers. Accelerated organ aging confers 20–50% higher mortality risk, and organ-specific diseases relate to faster aging of those organs. We find individuals with accelerated heart aging have a 250% increased heart failure risk and accelerated brain and vascular aging predict Alzheimer’s disease (AD) progression independently from and as strongly as plasma pTau-181, the current best blood-based biomarker for AD. Our models link vascular calcification, extracellular matrix alterations and synaptic protein shedding to early cognitive decline. We introduce a simple and interpretable method to study organ aging using plasma proteomics data, predicting diseases and aging effects. Link | PDF (Nature)
