A new blood test can find the biological age of 11 separate organ systems in the body. People with younger brains live longer. The results also let the researcher predict the odds of a person developing a disease linked to that organ up to 10 years later. The organ systems in the test were the brain, heart, lungs, arteries, liver, kidneys, pancreas, intestines, immune system, muscles and fat.
“The brain is the gatekeeper of longevity,” said Dr. Tony Wyss-Coray of Stanford Medicine, who led the research. “If you’ve got an old brain, you have an increased likelihood of mortality. If you’ve got a young brain, you’re probably going to live longer.”
Dr. Wyss-Coray’s team used data from 44,498 randomly selected people, aged 40 to 70, from the UK Biobank project. The people had been followed for 17 years for changes in their health. His team counted the amounts of almost 3,000 proteins in the blood. About 15 percent of those proteins are linked to individual organs. By putting those protein levels into an algorithm, they were able to get an age for people’s individual organs. One-third of people have at least one organ that was either “extremely aged” or “extremely youthful.” One in four people had multiple organs that were at the extremes of age.
Having an extremely aged organ was linked to a higher risk of illness linked to that organ. For instance, people with old hearts were more likely to have heart failure, and people with extremely aged lungs were more likely to develop chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). But, the most worrying finding was that people with extremely aged brains were 182 percent more likely to die during the study.
Dr. Wyss-Coray hopes that they will be able to evaluate already approved medications to see if they can restore organ youth and prevent diseases from developing. “This is, ideally, the future of medicine. Today, you go to the doctor because something aches, and they take a look to see what’s broken. We’re trying to shift from sick care to health care and intervene before people get organ-specific disease.”
Dr. Wyss-Coray and his team are working to bring their blood test out of the lab and into the doctor’s office. They are working with companies to get the price to come down by focusing on the test on the proteins linked to fewer key organs like the brain, immune system and heart. That way, the test will be more focused and less expensive.
