Brain: whoever has young people live longer

The biological age of a person tells more about his overall health state than the registry age, but not all organs have equal importance, in “deciding” if and when we get sick. The biological age of the brain is the best indicator of a person’s longevity: Who has a young brain will probably live longer than those with an old brain.

This was established by a study that developed an indicator to measure the “youth” of 11 different organ systems, and whose results were published on Nature Medicine.

“We have developed An indicator of the age of our organs based on the blood. With this indicator, we can evaluate the age of an organ today and foresee the chances of we fell ill with a disease associated with that organ in ten years “, explains Tony Wyss-Coray, professor of neurology and director of the Knight Initia for Brain Resilience of the University of Stanford.

This method may even predict those who run the greatest risk of dying from some medical conditions associated with the organs or systems whose biological age has been assessed, namely brain, muscles, heart, lungs, arteries, liver, kidneys, pancreas, immune system, intestine and body fat.

Researchers led by Wyss-Coray selected 44,498 participants of the UK Biobank health database between 40 and 70 years old, whose health had been monitored for 17 years. Thanks to advanced laboratory analysis techniques traced The levels of almost 3000 proteins in the blood of the participants15% of which originated by a single organ. They therefore calculated the average levels of each of those organ-specific proteins in the blood related to age.

From this starting point a algorithm was created that could calculate how much the composite protein signature of each valued body It diverged from the overall average protein signature of people of that age. The algorithm managed to assign a biological age to each of the 11 organ systems of each participant and to use it as an indication of the state of health of that organ.

Record a standard deviation (a statistical measure that indicates how much the data of a set are devoted from their average) greater than 1.5 put the body of that person in the condition of being defined Extremely young or extremely old. A third of the participants had an organ in these conditions.

The scientists then evaluated the risk of participants to develop 15 different diseases, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, chronic liver or kidney diseases, type 2 diabetes, two different heart diseases and two different lung diseases, rheumatoid arthritis (an autoimmune disease) and osteoarthritis (a degenerative disease of the joints).

The chances of getting some of these pathologies depended on the biological age not of one, but of more organseven if the strongest associations were those between the individual organ (for example, the heart) and the diseases that concerned it directly (for example, heart failure).

The association between having an extremely old brain and the risk of incurring a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s was very powerful: a person with a biologically old -fashioned brain has about 12 times more likely to receive a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease over the course in the following 10 years Compared to a person of the same age with a biologically young brain.

In addition, the age of the brain emerged that Best single mortality predictor for each cause. Having an extremely old brain increased the risk of death in the following 15 years of 182%, while those who had an extremely young brain showed an overall reduction of that risk of 40% in the same time.

The study opens up to the possibility of using the age of the brain as an indicator of the risk of Alzheimer’s disease. In addition, it would be interesting to connect the lifestyle and other factors modified to their impact on organ aging. According to the authors of the study, this is the future of medicine: restore the youth of an organ before developing diseases.