[ad_1]
In terms of biological aging, the body seems to shift gears three times in our lifetime, research suggests, with 34 years, 60 years and 78 years as key cutoffs.
In other words, it is proven that aging is not a long, continuous process that evolves at the same speed throughout our lives.
The findings could help us better understand how our bodies start to break down as we age and how specific age-related diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease or cardiovascular disease could be better treated.
The same study also came up with a new way to reliably predict the age of people using the levels of protein (the proteome) in their blood.
“By digging deep into the aging plasma proteome, we identify ripple changes over the course of human life”, the researchers wrote in their paper, published in the December 2019 issue of Nature Medicine.
“These changes were the result of groups of proteins moving in different patterns, resulting in the appearance of three waves of aging.They add.
The team analyzed data on blood plasma from 4,263 people aged 18 to 95 tested the levels of around 3,000 different proteins They moved through these biological systems and acted as a snapshot of what is going on in the body: 1379 of them varied with age.
Although these protein levels are often kept relatively constant, The researchers found that large changes in multiple protein readings occurred around young adulthood (34 years old), late fifties (60 years old) and old age (78 years old).
It is not yet clear why and how this happens; But if the protein goes back to its sources, it could allow a doctor, for example, to warn you that your liver is aging faster than the average person’s.
It also emphasizes the link between aging and blood, which has been found in previous studies.
“We have known for a long time that measuring certain proteins in the blood can give you information about a person’s state of health, for example lipoproteins for cardiovascular health,” said neurologist Tony Wyss-Coray, of the Stanford Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (ADRC) at the time.
“But it was not appreciated that the levels of so many different proteins, about a third of all the ones we analyzed, change markedly with age,” added.
The researchers were able to establish a system whereby the mixture of 373 selected proteins in the blood could be used to accurately predict a person’s age, within about three years.
Interestingly, when the system was unable to predict an age that was too young, the subject was generally very healthy for their age.
Another finding from the study provides further evidence for something that has long been suspected: men and women age differently. Of the 1,379 proteins that were found to change with age, 895 (almost two-thirds) were significantly more predictive for one sex than for the other.
These are still early discoveries (Researchers say any clinical application could take five to 10 years) and it will still take a lot of work to find out how all of these proteins are markers of aging and whether or not they contribute to it.
Still, it raises the possibility that one day you will have a blood test that will measure your aging, at least at the cellular level.
And the more we know about aging, the more we can do about it. It could tell everything from knowing what to eat and drink to potentially add a few more years to life, to identifying treatments to avoid some of the worst age-related afflictions.
“Ideally, you would like to know how pretty much anything you have taken or done affects your physiological age.” Said Wyss-Coray.
KEEP READING
[ad_2]
Source link