Every person ages differently, meaning two people can have the same chronological age but different biological ages. In the future, medical advancements are expected to determine how a person is aging and design personalized interventions to delay diseases and extend the health span.
What is a Biological Age?
Biological aging refers to a process that can cause the viability of organs to deteriorate over time. Essentially, biological age is the rate at which cells are aging, independent of their actual date of birth. This comprehensive concept is related not only to lifespan but also to other health-related conditions.
Changes in a person's genetic material are key to determining their biological age. In determining the biological age, researchers usually look at a component of chromosomes called telomeres and the way DNA is aging in the process called DNA methylation.
Other biomarkers help determine a person's biological age. These include joint mobility, hearing, vision, and blood pressure. Cholesterol is also one of the best-known biomarkers to be measured in the blood. Together, the values of these biomarkers give a person's estimated biological age.
Predicting Aging Trajectories
At the University of Pittsburgh, scientists have uncovered blood-based markers related to healthy and rapid aging. Their new research, "A molecular index for biological age identified from the metabolome and senescence-associated secretome in humans," points to pathways and compounds that can underlie biological age. Their findings can help design novel targets for interventions to slow aging and promote health span.
Led by Aditi U. Gurkar, the research team compared 196 older adults classified as healthy or rapid agers based on how easily they completed simple walking challenges. Walking ability is considered a holistic measure of physical strength, cardiovascular fitness, and neurological health since it is regarded as the best predictor of disability, hospitalization, functional decline, and death.
Healthy agers were individuals 75 years or older who could ascend a flight of stairs or walk for 15 minutes without resting. Meanwhile, the rapid agers are those 65 to 75 years old who had to rest during these challenges.
The team performed metabolics to define a molecular fingerprint of biological aging in blood samples from participants. Instead of studying the genes, they prefer to look at metabolites since they change in real-time to reflect a person's health. Metabolites can also be influenced by diet, lifestyle, and environment. The study reveals that healthy and rapid agers have clear differences in their metabolomes, an indication that metabolites in the blood can indeed reflect biological age.
In the next phase of the study, Gurkar and her colleagues identified 25 metabolites, which they called the Healthy Aging Metabolic (HAM) Index. They discovered that the HAM Index was better than conventional aging metrics at spotting healthy and rapid agers. With the help of an artificial intelligence model, the scientists were able to predict potential drivers of biological traits.
In the future, the team plans to explore how the metabolites and the molecular pathways that created them play a role in biological aging. They also aim to conduct more research to evaluate the timely shift in the metabolome of younger individuals.
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