Your Brain Reveals a Lot About Your Age
It is an automatic behavior when you meet someone new: unconsciously, you take stock of the physical clues to assess their age. Facial wrinkles, gray hairs, an unstable walk: all this signals a more advanced age.
Often, these assumptions are quite precise, and the researchers try to reproduce this internal age calculator to understand the elderly – not chronologically, but biologically.
In a new article published in Nature MedicineTony Wyss-Coray, professor of neurology at the University of Stanford and director of the Phil and Penny Knight for Brain Resilience, and his colleagues report a blood test that they have developed who can determine “the biological age of a person:” A number based on your internal health which can be able to capture more precisely the way you age that your birthday age.
The search test of unique protein sets at 11 organ systems, and each of these protein groups provides a window on the health of the corresponding organ. Overall, they can help predict people likely to develop certain diseases over the next decade.
Based on the analysis, the brain seems to be a particularly strong predictor not only of Alzheimer’s disease, but also of longevity. Researchers found that people with brain who were older than their chronological age tended to die earlier than those with younger brains than their real age.
Build a biological clock
Scientists have long been interested in studying the gap between the chronological age of a person and their biological age, because the difference reflects the speed with which someone could age – a process influenced by factors such as diseases, environmental exhibitions, smoking, diet and other life style factors. Various calculations such as that used in this study – thus called “biological clocks” – existing to determine the biological age of a person, but prove their reliability and precision have been difficult.
To generate a stronger scientific base for a biological clock, Wyss-Coray began with the fact that body organs tend to produce specific proteins that are their own. His hypothesis was that monitoring how these proteins change over time could indicate how healthy the organ is and how good it works. This is what blood tests do during your annual physique: they give an overview of the state of the heart, liver and other organs so that doctors have an idea of their functioning and if they change over time.
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Wyss-Coray passed this idea to the next level by studying 3,000 proteins in 45,000 people, aged 40 to 70 who provided blood samples to British biobank. These proteins have been identified as one of the 11 different organs: adipose tissue, artery, brain, heart, immune fabric, intestine, kidney, liver, lung, muscle and pancreas. He also developed a machine learning model that recorded levels of these proteins in healthy people and those with disease. Because samples were linked to people’s age, Wyss-Coray could also trace which protein levels were associated at what age.
When he did this, he found the biological age of a given organ in a given person, which he could then compare to their chronological age to have a sense for which people were growing faster. The 20 proteins associated with the brain have proven to be good agents to calculate the overall biological age of a person.
“If I have a measurement [of the brain proteins] From any person at random, I can try to integrate it and say: “This person must be around this old one”, “he says.” This gives an estimate of the age of this person, or the age of this brain. »»
A new overview of aging
Wyss-Coray does not know why the brain is a stand-in so strong for the rest of the organ systems, but it is possible that the brain somehow reflects the overall state of the disease or damage to the body and other organ systems, or that the brain is a central orchestrator of different organs and supervises its function and its long.
Because the study followed people who provided samples for 15 to 17 years, Wyss-Coray could also examine how biological age was correlated with death. Those whose age of the biological brain was younger than their chronological age presented a risk of 40% of death during the study compared to normal agers. People with older brains were not only more likely to have shorter lives, but also three times more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease – a level similar to a copy of the APoe4 genetic risk factor – than normal agers.
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The more the organs of an “older” person, the higher their risk of death; Having two to four elderly organs has increased the risk of dying during the study more than twice, and having eight eight or more organs has increased the risk of eight times. “There is an increase in stages of the risk of dying,” says Wyss-Coray. “It’s pretty striking.”
Although sober, the results are also full of hope, he said. Unlike genes, proteins can be modified and organs health can be modified with drugs, lifestyle behavior or both. People in the study who took one of the six drugs or supplements – COD liver oil, glucosamine, ibuprofen, multivitamins, treatment of premarine or vitamin C hormones – were tend to have at least two organ systems that were biologically younger than their chronological age. People who do not smoke or drank excessively and who were sleeping regularly well had also tend to have younger organs.
“In the future -and, to a certain extent, even now -, in the soul, there are ways to intervene,” explains Wyss -Coray. “It is similar to bring your car to the garage once a year, when they use a computer diagnosis to show if all the different parts of your car are correct. What is good here is that it potentially gives people something in their hands that they can change.”
