Researchers Develop New Tool To Measure Biological Age

Stanford researchers have developed a blood-based AI tool that calculates the biological age of individual organs to reveal early signs of aging-related disease. The Mercury News reports: The tool, unveiled in Nature Medicine Wednesday, was developed by a research team spearheaded by Tony Wyss-Coray. Wyss-Coray, a Stanford Medicine professor who has spent almost 15 years fixated on the study of aging, said that the tool could 'change our approach to health care.' Scouring a single draw of blood for thousands of proteins, the tool works by first comparing the levels of these proteins with their average levels at a given age. An artificial intelligence algorithm then uses these gaps to derive a 'biological age' for each organ.

To test the accuracy of these 'biological ages,' the researchers processed data for 45,000 people from the UK Biobank, a database that has kept detailed health information from over half a million British citizens for the last 17 years. When they analyzed the data, the researchers found a clear trend for all 11 organs they studied; biologically older organs were significantly more likely to develop aging-related diseases than younger ones. For instance, those with older hearts were at much higher risk for atrial fibrillation or heart failure, while those with older lungs were much more likely to develop chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

But the brain's biological age, Wyss-Coray said, was 'particularly important in determining or predicting how long you're going to live.' 'If you have a very young brain, those people live the longest,' he said. 'If you have a very old brain, those people are going to die the soonest out of all the organs we looked at.' Indeed, for a given chronological age, those with 'extremely aged brains' -- the 7% whose brains scored the highest on biological age -- were over 12 times more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease over the next decade than those with 'extremely youthful brains' -- the 7% whose brains inhabited the other end of the spectrum.

Wyss-Coray's team also found several factors -- smoking, alcohol, poverty, insomnia and processed meat consumption -- were directly correlated with biologically aged organs. Poultry consumption, vigorous exercise, and oily fish consumption were among the factors correlated with biologically youthful organs. Supplements like glucosamine and estrogen replacements also seemed to have 'protective effects,' Wyss-Coray said. The test... would cost $200 once it could be operated at scale.

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