John Mac
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
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:
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
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 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
