Candles on your birthday cake don’t tell the whole story. As anyone who has ever watched a high school reunion can tell you, some people grow older than others.
Anyone who put the candles in your cake probably should not guess your chronological time. But research has shown that we also have what is called “biological age”, a cryptic but more accurate measure of our normal condition and the likelihood of developing disorders associated with aging from a heart problem in Alzheimer’s disease.
We all assume that people’s real ages, almost unconsciously, scanning their faces for wrinkles, wide eyes and other signs. But understanding how old the brain is, the arteries or kidneys is another issue. The organs that are mounted within our body age at different speeds, also according to a new study by Stanford Medicine researchers.
We have developed an index based on the blood of the age of your organs. With this indicator, we can evaluate the age of an instrument today and predict the chances of getting a disease associated with this organ 10 years later. ”
Tony Wyss-Coray, PhD, Professor of Neurology and Neurology and Director of the Knight for Brain Resilience
They can even predict who is more likely to die of medical diseases associated with one or more of the 11 separate organs systems that the researchers examined: the brain, the muscles, the heart, the lung, the arteries, the liver, the kidneys, the pancreas, the immune system.
The biological age of an instrument – the brain – plays an oversized role in determining how long you have let you live, Wyss -Coray said.
“The brain is the tower of longevity,” he said. “If you have an old brain, you have an increased chance of mortality. If you have a young brain, you will probably live longer.”
Wyss-Coray, Professor DH Chen II, is the senior author of the study, who will be published online on July 9 Natural medicine. The lead author is Hamilton Oh, PhD, a former postgraduate student in the Wyss-Cora Group.
Eleven organ systems, 3,000 proteins, 45,000 people
Scientists were reset in 44,498 randomly selected participants, aged 40 to 70 years, who came from a timeless attempt to collect data called UK Biobank. This ongoing effort has collected multiple blood samples and up -to -date medical reports from about 600,000 people for several years. These participants were attended for up to 17 years for changes in their health status.
The WYSS-CORAY team used an advanced commercially available laboratory technology that measures the amounts of about 3,000 blood proteins in each participant. About 15% of these proteins can be detected at the roots of one organs and many of the other in generation of multiple organs.
Researchers supplied the levels of proteins transmitted from blood to a computer and determine the average levels of each of these protein specific proteins in the blood of these people, adapted to age. From this, scientists have created an algorithm that found how the signature of the complex protein for each assessment of each instrument differs from the overall average for people of that age.
Based on the differences between the levels of protein adapted to age and age, the algorithm attributes a biological age to each of the 11 different organs or systems evaluated for each subject. And he measured how far the signature of polyprotein of each organ in any given person deviates in any direction from the average for people of the same chronological era. These protein signatures were used as proxies for the relevant biological condition of the individual organs. A typical deviation greater than 1.5 from the average was put on a person’s organ in the “extremely elderly” or “extremely youthful” category.
One-third of people in the study had at least one instrument with a standard divergence of 1.5-or-greater average deviation, with researchers defining any instrument such as “extremely older” or “extremely youthful”. One in four participants had many extremely older or youth organs.
For the brain, the “extremely elderly” were translated into the existence between the brain of the participants of 6% of participants, whose protein signatures fell to one end of the distribution of biological age. The “extremely youthful” brains fell to 6% to 7% at the opposite end.
Health results were promoted
The algorithm also predicted the future health of people, an organ of an organ, based on the biological age of their current organs. Wyss-Coray and his colleagues were tested for correlations between extremely older organs and any of the 15 different disorders, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, chronic hepatic or kidney disease, type 2 diabetes, two different heart disease and two different pneumonia Osteoarthitis and more.
The risks to many of these diseases have been affected by numerous biological ages of different organs. But the strongest associations were between a person’s organically elderly organ and the possibility that this person would develop a disease associated with this organ. For example, the existence of an extremely elderly heart predicted a higher risk of vaginal fibrillation or heart failure, having elderly lungs provided for an increased risk of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and having an old brain.
The association between an extremely elderly brain and the development of Alzheimer’s disease was particularly strong – 3.1 times that of a person with normal aging brain. In the meantime, the existence of an extremely youthful brain was particularly protective against Alzheimer’s – just a quarter of a person with a normally older brain.
In other words, someone with a biologically old brain is about 12 times more likely to receive a new diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease over the next decade as someone of the same age with organic young brain.
In addition, Wyss-Coray said, the brain era was the best single predictor of overall mortality. With an extremely elderly brain increased the risk of deaths of the subjects by 182% over a period of about 15 years, while people with extremely youthful brains had a total reduction of 40% of the risk of dying during the same duration.
Predicting the disease, then, preventing her
“This approach could lead to human experiments that test new longevity interventions for their impact on the biological ages of individual organs on individual people,” Wyss-Coray said.
Medical researchers can, for example, be able to use the extreme era of the brain as an attorney for Alzheimer’s impending disease and intervene before the onset of external symptoms, when there is still time to capture it, he said.
The careful collection of lifestyle, nutrition and prescription or complementary recruitment-submission to clinical trials, in combination with the age of the organs, could shed light on the medical value of the contributions of these factors in the aging of the various organs as well as the Illness for which the advanced age of the organs puts at high risk.
“This is, ideally, the future of medicine,” he said. “Today, go to the doctor because something hurts and take a look to see what is broken. We try to shift from sick care in healthcare and intervene before people gain a special illness for the organ.”
Although the detailed tool is only available for research purposes now, Wyss-Cora Pages is planning to commercialize it. He is a co -founder and scientific employee of Teal Omics and Vero Bioscience, two companies in which the Stanford University Technology Office has authorized the technology authorized therein and a related research on commercialization, respectively, screens for new drug targets and a consumer product.
The test could be available in the next two to three years, Wyss-Coray said. “The cost will be reduced as we focus on fewer basic organs, such as the brain, heart and immune system, to get more resolution and stronger bonds with specific diseases.”
The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health (P50AG047366 and P30AG066515 grants), the Galaxy Foundation, the Knight Initiative for brain durability and the Stanford Alzheimer’s Research Center.
Source:
Magazine report:
Oh, Hs-H., et al. (2025). Protein creature connects the aging of the brain and the immune system to Healthspan and longevity. Natural medicine. Doi.org/10.1038/S41591-025-03798-1.
