In short: we were still basking with the last eight centenaries of Perdasdefogu, the Sardinian village that in 2014 had won the world Guinness Book of family longevity. We discussed the recipe he brought the island of Okinawa, Japan, to deserve the title of land of the immortals.
Now for all these records they seem to be pulverized in front of a new study, published on Nature Communication (here the text) that moves the biological hands of man up to a maximum limit of 150 years. To write it, the research team of a biotech company based in Singapore in collaboration with the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo (United States). A company that has the modest goal of hacking complex diseases and aging with artificial intelligence for drug discovery and digital biomarkers.
Calculations with artificial intelligence tools
Is exactly technological innovation applied to the world of medicine at the center of this study. The team of experts in biology and biophysics led by Tim Pyrkov, first author of the study, presented the results of a detailed analysis of the dynamic properties of the fluctuations of physiological indices along individual aging trajectories. As Richard Faragher explains, Professor of Biogerontology at the University of Brighton, in an article published in the Spanish newspaper El Pas, intuitively, there should be one relationship between the possibility of dying and the speed and extent to which a person heals from a disease. This parameter is a measure of the capacity of maintain homeostasis, the normal biological balance, and known as resilience . Indeed, aging can be defined as the loss of the ability to maintain homeostasis. Typically, the younger a person, the better able to recover from the disease quickly.
A new parameter: the indicator of the dynamic state of organisms
Faragher continues: To perform the modeling, the researchers took blood samples from over 70,000 participants aged up to 85 years and observed short-term changes in the number of blood cells. The number of White blood cells that a person has can indicate the level of inflammation (disease) in his body, while the volume of Red blood cells it can be an indicator of the risk of heart disease, stroke, or cognitive impairment, such as memory loss. Scientists have therefore simplified these data into a single parameter that they called “indicator of the dynamic state of organisms” (DOSI). Changes in participants’ DOSI values allowed predicting who would contract age-related diseases and how this varied from person to person and shaped the loss of resilience over time. These calculations predicted that in all cases – regardless of health or genetics – resilience would cease to function completely at 150 years, placing a theoretical limit on the duration of human life.
Help to understand future anti-aging interventions
This team work shows that longitudinal studies provide new possibilities for understanding the aging process and the systematic identification of biomarkers of human aging in big biomedical data. The research will help understand the limits of longevity and future anti-aging interventions. More importantly, the study can help bridge the growing gap between health and life span, which continues to expand in most developing countries, he says Brian Kennedy, Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry and Physiology at the National University of Singapore.
The news and limitations of the study
But is this study really new? And in what aspects? Yes, in the sense that we have always been very uncertain about the definitive limit of life, also because precisely there have never been such precise studies, he replies Professor Marco Trabucchi, president of the Italian Association of Psychogeriatrics. But this work tells us a very clear thing: we cannot reach that age through the means that are granted to us by science and medicine. It tells us that, by maintaining a healthy lifestyle and preventing disease, we will also not be able to exceed the 150 year limit. Until that age, the possibility of resilience would be preserved. Therefore on this potential for resilience we must build interventions for our life and for those of the communities. And in my opinion we need to be realistic, he continues It is important to be able to arrive well, for as long as possible, but 150 is not a goal that I would like to achieve. I’d settle for much less. And then I don’t think we could live 150 years in serenity: it would be a disastrous life, dragged into darkness, pain and fatigue, psychological even before biological.
July 2, 2021 (change July 2, 2021 | 18:07)
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