Would you rather: know when you’re going to die, or how? Well, scientists may now be able to predict both. But it’s not all doom and gloom…
We may not (yet) be able to see the future, but scientists can now predict which of your organs will fail you first, according to a new study. But rather than a morbid window on your fate, the discovery could allow doctors to target these ageing organs early – before the symptoms of disease appear.
The study, published in Nature, reveals that a whopping one in every five healthy adults aged over 50 has at least one organ that is ageing too fast. This means that they have a heightened risk of developing a disease in that organ over the next 15 years.
How can ageing happen at different rates in your body?
We all have two ages: the one you celebrate every year on your birthday that (unless you lie about it) goes up by one every year. The other, called your ‘biological age’ is more flexible, changing depending on how healthy you are. Scientists can work this out by studying the complex combinations of biological signs in your body.
In a study involving 5,678 people, researchers at Stanford Medicine worked out the biological ages not of the participants themselves, but of their organs. They did this by studying the proteins in their blood.
What this revealed was that when the age of someone’s organ is higher than those of other people the same age, that person has a higher risk of disease.
Rather than being on the same track towards death, each of our organs die at different rates. Certain proteins in our blood are linked to certain organs, and unusually high or low levels of these often accompany accelerated ageing and vulnerability to disease.
The Stanford scientists began their investigation by analysing the blood of 1,400 healthy people aged 20 to 90. They then fed these peoples’ protein combinations into a machine-learning algorithm which they trained to predict age. The scientists tested the algorithm on 4,000 more people to verify its accuracy.
The team focused on the biological ages of 11 key organs: heart, brain, fat, lung, immune system, liver, muscle, pancreas, vasculature, and intestine. For each of these organs, they worked out the ‘age gap’ between chronological age and biological age. Why? This figure reveals how aged organs are compared to the norms for their age group.
It revealed that only one in sixty people have two organs that are ageing rapidly – but these people are 6.5 times more likely to die compared to someone without any rapidly ageing organs. They also discovered that people with ‘older’ brains were 1.8 times more likely to show signs of cognitive decline over five years than people with ‘younger’ brains.
“If we can reproduce this finding in 50,000 or 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 ageing in people’s bodies,” Dr Tony Wyss-Coray, professor of neurology at Stanford and senior author of paper, said. “We might be able to treat people before they get sick.”
Read more:
- Here’s how you can reverse your biological age, according to breakthrough new study
- Wild ideas in science: There’s an off-switch for ageing
- Revolutionary new ultrasound procedure could delay ageing and memory loss