Amazing stuff! Organs in your body may have different biological ages due to different speeds of aging?
This also makes a strong case for regular routine preventive examinations/checkups early in life.
"... But new research suggests you may really be as old as your oldest organ. Scientists say they have developed a simple, blood test–based method to measure the speed of aging in individual organs such as the heart and brain. When an organ is substantially “older” than a person’s actual age, the risk of death and diseases related to that part of the body shoots up ...
To come up with a practical, organ-specific measure of aging, ... made a list of proteins that are particularly concentrated—and thus likely to have relevant functions—in each of 11 major organs, including the heart, brain, kidneys, liver, and pancreas. They then measured levels of these proteins in blood samples from more than 1000 healthy people between ages 27 and 104. Feeding this information into machine-learning algorithms gave the team protein signatures for a typical 55-year-old heart, say, or a 75-year-old liver.
The researchers next scanned blood samples from a total of more than 5500 people from five previous medical studies to test whether their organs were aging faster or slower than expected. The protein signatures from this group, which consisted mostly of older white adults, revealed that about one-fifth of people had one organ that appeared substantially older than its chronological age; nearly 2% had accelerated aging in two or more organs. ..."
From the abstract:
"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 (ref. 5), 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."
Fig. 1: Plasma proteins can model organ aging.
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