Your age may just be a number: How well you're aging may be better exposed by a pattern of chemicals create in your blood than by that number. Indeed, a new study finds that convinced "biomarker signatures" in the blood can signal people's risk of later emerging some age-related health conditions.
A person's chronological age doesn't unavoidably indicate their overall health or their risk for certain situations. These biomarker signatures, by comparing it, may offer better insight into a person's risk of age-related illnesses and death over an 8-year period, the study shows.
"These signatures depict variances in how people age, and they show promise in envisaging healthy aging, changes in cognitive and physical function, survival and age-related diseases such as heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and cancer," the academics wrote in the study, published today (Jan. 6) in the journal Aging Cell.
Healthy Blood Promotes Healthy Cell
"We can now distinguish and measure various of biomarkers from a small amount of blood, with the idea of sooner or later being able to predict who is at risk of a wide range of sicknesses, long before any clinical signs become obvious," senior study author Dr. Thomas Perls, a professor of medicine at the Boston University School of Medicine, said in a report.
In the study, the researchers calculated the levels of 19 biomarkers in the blood specimens of more than 4,700 people who were registered in an ongoing international research project called the Long Life Family Study.
The biomarkers included in the study were connected to many functions in the body, including those of the immune system, the endocrine system and the kidneys, and metabolism. Previous research had made known that the levels of these biomarkers differ with age, the researchers wrote.
About half of the people in the study had "signature 1," the researchers found. This signature was deemed to be the position point for all the other signatures in the study, because the levels of the biomarkers lined up with what researchers would expect based on people's age and sex. For example, biomarkers associated with inflammation are thought to upsurge with age, while biomarkers associated with certain aspects of kidney function are thought to decrease with age.
Signature 2 was the "healthy aging" signature, and was initiated in about one quarter of the participants, per the study. This signature was associated with better physical and cognitive functioning, a lower risk of type 2 diabetes and a lower risk of death over the 8-year study period compared with signature 1, the researchers found.
Another eight signatures were associated with higher levels of risk for different diseases and outcomes compared with signature 1, per the study. The remaining 16 signatures were not related with people's risk of disease as they aged.
Such trials could use the biomarker signatures "to detect the effects, or absence of effects, that they are looking for" much earlier than current trials of drugs do, Sebastiani said.
The researchers renowned that more studies on larger groups of people are still needed to further settle the results. In addition, many more biomarkers could also play a role in the signature, and as well as them could perhaps lead to "even more powerful outcomes," they wrote.
