Blood test shows which of your organs 'ageing fastest' and likely to fail first
A simple blood test can now reveal which body organ is likely to fail first - meaning patients can be treated for an illness before they even get sick, scientists say.
The groundbreaking discovery allows doctors to predict which organs are ageing the quickest and work out which health conditions are the likeliest to develop. It’s good news for Brits over the age of 50 because about one in five people this age have an organ ageing at a strongly accelerated rate, the study published in the journal Nature found.
Throughout the study, scientists studied proteins in the blood of 5,678 patients and linked the levels of these proteins to specific organs. They flagged all proteins whose genes were four times more highly activated in one organ compared with any other organ to predict each of the organ’s ages.
The discovery can be used to implement treatments earlier, scientists say (Getty Images/iStockphoto)Professor Tony Wyss-Coray from Stanford Medicine, California, said: “We can estimate the biological age of an organ in an apparently healthy person. That, in turn, predicts a person’s risk for disease related to that organ. When we compared each of these organs’ biological age for each individual with its counterparts among a large group of people without obvious severe diseases, we found that 18.4 per cent of those age 50 or older had at least one organ ageing significantly more rapidly than the average. And we found that these individuals are at heightened risk for disease in that particular organ in the next 15 years.”
Results showed how people with accelerated heart ageing were at 2.5 times as high a risk of heart failure as people with normally ageing hearts and those with “older” brains were 1.8 times as likely to show cognitive decline over five years as those with “young” brains. They were also at a higher risk of Alzheimer’s disease.
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Prof Wyss-Coray added: “If we can reproduce this finding in 50,000 or 100,000 individuals, it will mean that by monitoring the health of individual organs in apparently healthy people, 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.”
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