Researchers from Stanford Medicine at Stanford University have revealed a new, simple way of studying organ ageing using a blood test to predict individuals’ risk of diseases associated with organ failure.
In a study published in Nature, Stanford Medicine scientists analysed 5,678 people and identified that organs age at different rates.
Organ failure is when a major organ of the body stops working and can be caused by multiple diseases, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, cystic fibrosis and diabetes.
When an organ’s age is further advanced in comparison to other individuals of the same age, the person carrying it has a heightened risk of developing diseases associated with organ failure.
Researchers numbered 11 key organs, organ systems, or tissues, including the heart, lung, immune system, kidney, liver, muscle, pancreas, brain, vasculature and intestine.
Researchers assessed the levels of thousands of proteins in people’s blood using commercially available technologies and an algorithm of their own design to make predictions using blood test results and patient data.
The study revealed that around one in five healthy adults aged 50 or older may have an organ ageing at an accelerated rate.
They determined that around 1,000 of those proteins were associated with one or another single organ and identified aberrant levels of proteins that corresponded to the accelerated ageing of organs and the susceptibility to disease and mortality.
After checking the levels of nearly 5,000 proteins in the blood of nearly 1,400 people aged 20 to 90, researchers found nearly 858 organ-specific proteins.
Dr Tony Wyss-Coray, professor of neurology at Stanford Medicine and the study’s senior author, said “that 18.4% of those aged 50 and older had at least one organ ageing significantly more rapidly than average” and “are at heightened risk for disease in that particular organ in the next 15 years”.
The study will require further investigation to determine how accurately it predicts organ age and health.
“If we can reproduce this finding in 50,000 or 100,000 individuals, it will mean that… we might be able to find organs that are undergoing accelerated ageing in people’s bodies, and we might be able to treat people before they get sick,” said Wyss-Coray.