The Latest Frontier in the World of Longevity: Organ Age
Measuring organ age could be used to ward off future diseases
www.wsj.com/health/wellness/aging-biological-age-organs-health-9b6a4798
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The Wall Street journal article is written by Alex Janin, the same woman who wrote the rapamycin article for the Wall Street Journal. She’s generally a pretty well-reasoned writer…
Here is the full open access article:
To Get Ahead of Diseases, It May Help to Find Your Organ Age
Measuring organ age could be used to ward off future diseases
How old is your pancreas? What about your brain or heart?
Scientists have come up with a way to estimate the age of organs, separate from the body’s age as a whole. They found in a recent study that many of us are walking around with at least one organ aging much more quickly than the others, and that older organs can indicate a greater chance of developing diseases.
Relationship between organ age gap and future mortality risk over 15 years
Measuring organ age is the latest frontier in the world of biological age, the idea that your body’s physical age can be different from its chronological one. For example, a 50-year-old man hypothetically might have physical health that more closely resembles that of a 53-year-old, with, say, a 51-year-old heart and a 54-year-old brain.
Knowing the age of your organs might one day help you prevent and treat disease. In theory, if you knew that your heart was aging too fast, you could take steps to ward off heart disease.
“Heart aging predicts future heart disease, and brain aging predicts future dementia,” says Hamilton Oh, one of the paper’s lead authors and a graduate student at Stanford.
Walking into your doctor’s office and getting a simple test to determine your organ age is likely still a ways off, but the concept is gaining interest among researchers, doctors and people focused on their own longevity and health. Scientists caution that more research is needed before such a technology might be ready for mainstream use. Some also say that parts of the recent study made too many assumptions.
Full article: To Get Ahead of Diseases, It May Help to Find Your Organ Age
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