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AGe is just a number, they say. But being young in the soul could be less important than being “young” in other places.
Chronological age and biological age are known to diverge during our lives, because our genetics and the way we live can influence the damage that our cells accumulate. A new type of experimental blood test is now focused on the biological age of different organs in our body. And it is not the heart, the liver or the lungs that seems to have the greatest predictive power of our lifespan, but the brain – the seat of our thoughts, actions and emotions.
“The brain is the guardian of longevity,” said Professor of Neurology at the University of Stanford and author of a new study in Nature Tony Wyss-Coray, in a press release.
Wyss-Coray and his colleagues studied blood samples and medical reports extending over 17 years for nearly 45,000 people aged 40 to 70. The researchers completed the relative concentrations of 3,000 different proteins in the blood of individuals who relay the health and functioning of various organs. Then, they created an automatic learning model which could predict chronological age according to protein signatures and calculated the age gap for each individual, creating a relative biological age rating for each of the different organs and organ systems. The algorithm was then able to predict future health, organ by organ.
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People with “extremely aged” brain compared to their age peers, based on protein profiles, were almost twice as likely to die over a period of 15 years. But people with an extremely young brain compared to even age peers – at the opposite end of the scale in terms of protein profiles – reduced the risk of dying of a person by 40% over this same period. One of the proteins that had the strongest weight in this cerebral aging profile was that called the light chain of the neurofilament – a biomarker which can point out degeneration in axons in the brain and is often measured in clinical trials of Alzheimer’s disease.
WYSS -CORAY hopes that this type of blood screen could also provide information on risks for more than a dozen diseases – from Alzheimer’s disease to the liver disease to osteoarthritis – based on organic organs. “Today, you go to the doctor because something hurts, and they take a look to see what is broken,” he said. But this organizational approach can help to concentrate future research on the longevity where it counts most in the body. “We are trying to have health care health care.”
Image of lead: n Universe / Shutterstock
