How old are you, really?
New research finds that not all body parts necessarily age in unison — and that when certain organs advance more quickly than others, it can present a significant health concern.
Scientists at Stanford Medicine found that 1 in 5 adults over the age of 50 are prone to having one anatomical feature age significantly faster and that 1.7% of studied individuals had multiple crucial bits speeding toward their sell by date — a significant worry.
“We find individuals with accelerated heart aging have a 250%
increased heart failure risk,” the
authors wrote.
Researchers found that accelerated brain and vascular aging predicted Alzheimer’s disease progression, while sped-up kidney aging was linked to diabetes and hypertension.
A simple blood test could provide an early warning signal for those at risk, however.
The test takes a deep, machine learning-powered analysis of several proteins to determine the probability of acceleration.
From that data, the researchers then created a so-called “age gap” between organs and peoples’ bodies as a whole.
“We can estimate the biological age of an organ in an apparently healthy person,” said senior author Tony Wyss-Coray.
“That, in turn, predicts a person’s risk for disease related to that organ.”
Wyss-Coray and team studied 11 crucial organs and related parts of the anatomy in 5,678 patients to learn the jarring one-in-five stat.
“We found that these [organ-aged] individuals are at heightened risk for disease in that particular organ in the next 15 years,” he said.
Meanwhile, the one in 60 people with multiple aged organs face 6.5 times the mortality rate of those whose innards are gracefully aging together.
There is optimism on the side of researchers that the blood test can signal damage before it becomes irreversible — especially if the findings can be replicated for 50,000 to 100,000 individuals.
“It will mean that by monitoring the health of individual organs in apparently healthy people, we might be able to find organs that are undergoing accelerated aging in people’s bodies, and we might be able to treat people before they get sick,” Wyss-Coray said.
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