A Simple Blood Test Can Reveal the True Age of Your Brain, Heart, and Other Organs
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Scientists have developed a blood test that estimates the biological age of individual organs, offering a new way to gauge future disease risk.
Your body is not aging as a single unit. While your driver’s license may say you’re 50, your brain could resemble that of someone much older, while your heart or kidneys remain comparatively young. Scientists are increasingly finding that each organ follows its own biological clock, and those hidden differences may determine not only which diseases you develop but also how long you live.
A new Stanford Medicine study found that a blood test can estimate the biological age of 11 major organs and organ systems. The researchers showed that unusually “old” organs were linked to a higher risk of developing diseases years later, with brain age emerging as one of the strongest predictors of both Alzheimer’s disease and overall mortality. “We’ve developed a blood-based indicator of the age of your organs,” said Tony Wyss-Coray, PhD, professor of neurology and neurological sciences and director of the Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience at the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute.
“With this indicator, we can assess the age of an organ today and predict the odds of your getting a disease associated with that organ 10 years later.” The method can also identify people with a higher chance of dying from conditions tied to one or more of the 11 organ systems examined in the study: brain, muscle, heart, lung, arteries, liver, kidneys, pancreas, immune system, intestine and fat. One organ’s biological age appears to matter especially strongly for lifespan. Wyss-Coray said the brain plays a central role in how long someone is likely to live.
“The brain is the gatekeeper of longevity,” he said. “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.” Wyss-Coray, the D.
Chen Professor II, is the senior author of the study, published in Nature Medicine. Hamilton Oh, PhD, a former graduate student in Wyss-Coray’s group, is the lead author.
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