2023-12-06 18:00:25
Just like a car or a house, the rate at which parts of our body deteriorate varies from one to another. A study carried out with 5.678 personasled by researchers from Stanford Medicine (Stanford UniversityUSA), has shown that our organs age at different rates, and when the age of an organ is especially advanced compared to that of its counterpart in other people of the same age, the person who carries it is at greater risk both of suffering from diseases associated with that organ and of dying.
According to the study, one in five reasonably healthy adults aged 50 or older has at least one organ that is aging at a very rapid rate.
The results of the Stanford team’s work, now published in Naturereveal that a simple blood test allows us to know which organs in a person’s body are aging rapidly, if any, and thus guide therapeutic interventions long before clinical symptoms manifest.
“We can estimate the biological age of an organ in an apparently healthy person,” explains the lead author of the study, Tony Wyss-Coray, professor of Neurology at the American institution. “That, in turn, predicts the risk of suffering from a disease related to that organ.”
We can estimate the biological age of an organ in an apparently healthy person. That, in turn, predicts the risk of suffering from a disease related to that organ.
Tony Wyss-Coray, study leader (Stanford Medicine)
Biological age vs. chronological age
“Numerous studies have presented single figures that represent the biological age of individuals – the age implied by a sophisticated set of biomarkers – versus their chronological age, that is, the actual number of years since their birth,” explains Wyss-Coray. .
The new work went a step further and obtained different figures for each of the 11 key organs, organ systems or tissues: heart, fat, lung, immune system, kidney, liver, muscle, pancreas, brain, vascular system and intestine.
“When we compared the biological age of each of these organs for each individual with their counterparts among a large group of people without obvious serious diseases, we found that 18.4% of those over 50 years of age had at least one organ that was aging significantly faster than average,” says Wyss-Coray. “And we found that these people are at higher risk of disease in that particular organ over the next 15 years.”
We found that 18.4% of those over 50 had at least one organ aging significantly faster than average
Tony Wyss-Coray
Only one in 60 people in the study had two organs aging at that rate. But, according to Wyss-Coray, “they had 6.5 times the risk of mortality than someone without any pronounced aging organs.”
Proteins and AI
The team has used technologies available on the market and a self-designed algorithm to evaluate the levels of thousands of proteins in people’s blood. The researchers determined that almost 1,000 of these proteins originated in one organ or another and linked the abnormal levels of those proteins to the accelerated aging of the corresponding organs and their susceptibility to disease and mortality.
To do this, he trained an algorithm AI machine learning to guess the age of people based on the levels of those almost 5,000 proteins. The algorithm chose the proteins that best correlate with a trait of interest (in this case, accelerated biological aging in a person or a specific organ) by asking, one by one: “Does this protein increase the correlation?”
The scientists tested the accuracy of the algorithm by evaluating the ages of another 4,000 people, who were somewhat representative of the US population.
They then used the proteins they had identified to focus on each of the 11 bodies that had been selected for analysismeasuring the levels of specific proteins for each organ in the blood of each individual.
Although there was a certain synchrony between the different organs in a person’s body, each of them followed its own path in the aging process.
Age difference between organs
For each of the 11 organs, Wyss-Coray’s team established an ‘age difference’: the difference between the actual age and their estimated age, from the algorithm’s calculations based on specific proteins of each organ.
The researchers found that age gaps identified in 10 of the 11 organs studied (with the sole exception of the intestine) were significantly associated with the risk of death from all causes over 15 years of follow-up.
Having an organ with accelerated aging carries a risk of mortality between 15% and 50% higher in the following 15 years, depending on the organ affected
Having an accelerated aging organ (defined as having a standard deviation of the organ’s biological age scored by algorithm one time greater than the group mean for that organ among people of the same chronological age) carries a mortality risk between 15% and 50% higher in the following 15 years, depending on the affected organ.
According to the study, people with accelerated heart aging, but who initially did not have any active disease or clinically abnormal biomarkers, had a 2.5 times higher risk of heart failure than people with normal heart aging.
‘Old’ brains were 1.8 times more likely to suffer cognitive decline over five years than ‘young’ brains. Accelerated aging of the brain or the vascular system – either – can predict the risk of Alzheimer’s disease progression as well as the best clinical biomarkers currently used, the authors say.
In addition, strong associations were observed between a kidney extreme aging score (more than two standard deviations above the norm) and hypertension and diabetes, as well as between a cardiac extreme aging score and atrial fibrillation and myocardial infarction .
‘Old’ brains are 1.8 times more likely to suffer cognitive decline within five years. The accelerated aging of this organ can predict the risk of Alzheimer’s as the best biomarkers
“If we are able to reproduce this finding in 50,000 or 100,000 people,” says Wyss-Coray, “monitoring the health of specific organs in apparently healthy people will allow us to detect organs that are aging rapidly and treat patients before they die.” let them get sick.”
Identifying the specific proteins of each organ that best indicate excessive aging of the organs and, consequently, a high risk of disease could also lead to new drug targets, he highlights.
Patent and creation of a company
Wyss-Coray, along with co-authors Hamilton Oh and Jarod Rutledge, have co-founded a company, Teal Omics, to explore the commercialization of your findings. The Stanford University Technology Licensing Office has filed a patent application related to this work.
Researchers from the University of Washington, the University of California, San Francisco, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and Montefiore Medical Center have also collaborated on this work.
The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Stanford Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, the Michael J. Fox Foundationthe Milky Way Research Foundation and Nan Fung Life Sciences.
Reference:
Hamilton Oh, and Jarod Rutledge et al. “Organ aging signatures in the plasma proteome track health and disease” Nature (December, 2023).
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