Biomarkers Indicating Midlife Health Decline

About 1 in every 5 reasonably healthy adults 50 or older is walking around with at least one organ #aging at a strongly accelerated rate. The silver lining: It may be possible that a simple blood test can tell which, if any, organs in a person’s body are aging rapidly, guiding therapeutic interventions well before clinical symptoms manifest. “We can estimate the biological age of an organ in an apparently healthy person,” said the study’s senior author, Tony Wyss-Coray, PhD, a professor of neurology. “That, in turn, predicts a person’s risk for disease related to that organ.” People with accelerated #heart aging but initially exhibiting no active disease or clinically abnormal biomarkers were at 2.5 times as high a risk of heart failure as people with normally aging hearts, the study showed. Those with “older” #brains were 1.8 times as likely to show cognitive decline over five years as those with “young” brains. Accelerated brain or vasculature aging — either one —predicted risk for Alzheimer’s disease progression as well as the best currently used clinical biomarkers do. There were likewise strong associations between an extreme-aging (more than 2 standard deviations above the norm) kidney score and both hypertension and diabetes, as well as between an extreme-aging heart score and both atrial fibrillation and heart attack. The team hopes to secure funding to validate the findings in a much larger population. Where this ultimately leads is a much more advanced evaluation of health risks than the #biomarkers we associate with standard patient physical exams today. Ideally they displace many of the screening tests we rely on today or give cause to validate much sooner. While medicine is anchored in treating disease, medical science is clearly shifting to a more proactive view. Learning that of elevated heart or dementia risk at age 80, 60, 40, 20, 10, or 2 inevitably yields different responses. Lifestyle is the biggest lever we have over chronic disease and the earlier we apply them, the more effective they are across one’s lifespan. Pair these blood serum tests with ever increasing genetics testing at birth, and we can finally see light at the end of the tunnel on breaking the current downward health spiral and discovering genuine, self-managed, “public health.” https://lnkd.in/e_fu65s4

A 2019 cohort study (PMID: 31603488) found that faster gait speed at age 45 was associated with superior cognitive function, greater brain volume, and a slower pace of biological aging (equivalent to 5 fewer years of physiological wear and tear). Study: - Participants: 904 adults from the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study. - Population-based longitudinal cohort study with assessments from age 3 to 45. - Primary outcomes: Composite gait speed (usual, dual-task, maximum speed), IQ, brain structure, and pace of aging. - Cognitive measures: Full-scale IQ, working memory, processing speed, verbal comprehension, and perceptual reasoning. - Biological aging markers: 19-biomarker pace of aging index and perceived facial age. - Brain metrics: Total brain volume, cortical thickness, surface area, white matter hyperintensities. Findings: ✅ Participants in the fastest gait quintile scored 16 IQ points higher than those in the slowest quintile. ✅ Faster walkers had greater brain volume and thicker cortices. ✅ The fastest quintile exhibited a pace of aging 5 years slower than the slowest group (based on biomarker trajectory from ages 26–45). ✅ Faster gait was associated with better cognitive performance across all domains, including working memory and verbal fluency. Limitations: 🔹 No gait or MRI data prior to age 45, limiting insight into trajectories. 🔹 Brain imaging was cross-sectional - causality cannot be inferred. 🔹 Gait speed was not linked to longitudinal disease outcomes (e.g., dementia) in this analysis. At midlife, gait speed may serve as an early integrative biomarker of aging, brain health, and cognitive reserve - offering a simple, non-invasive tool for stratifying aging trajectories before clinical decline manifests.

Predicting organ aging by analyzing distinct proteins in plasma Using commercially available technologies and an algorithm of their own design, the researchers assessed the levels of thousands of proteins in people’s blood, determined that nearly 1,000 of those proteins originated within one or another single organ, and tied aberrant levels of those proteins to corresponding organs’ accelerated aging and susceptibility to disease and mortality. They started by checking the levels of nearly 5,000 proteins in the blood of just under 1,400 healthy people ages 20 to 90 but mostly in mid- to late stages of life, and flagging all proteins whose genes were four times more highly activated in one organ compared with any other organ. They found nearly 900 such organ-specific proteins, which they whittled down to 858 for purposes of reliability. For each of the 11 organs, the team came up with an “age gap”: the difference between an organ’s actual age and its estimated age based on the algorithm’s organ-specific-protein-driven calculations. The researchers found that the identified age gaps for 10 of the 11 organs studied (the only exception being intestine) were significantly associated with future risk of death from all causes over 15 years of follow-up. Having an accelerated-aging organ (defined as having a 1-standard-deviation higher algorithm-scored biological age of the organ than the group average for that organ among people of the same chronological age) carried a 15% to 50% higher mortality risk over the next 15 years, depending on which organ was affected.   People with accelerated heart aging but initially exhibiting no active disease or clinically abnormal biomarkers were at 2.5 times as high a risk of heart failure as people with normally aging hearts, the study showed. Those with “older” brains were 1.8 times as likely to show cognitive decline over five years as those with “young” brains. Accelerated brain or vasculature aging — either one —predicted risk for Alzheimer’s disease progression as well as the best currently used clinical biomarkers do. #ScienceMission #ScienceNewsHighlights https://lnkd.in/dv39twkr