Inflammation and age-related diseases
A system for predicting life expectancy by blood analysis has been created
American scientists have developed a system that allows, based on the analysis of certain proteins in the blood indicating the overall level of inflammation, to determine biological age, predict the risk of developing cardiovascular diseases and estimate life expectancy. The results of the study are published in the journal Nature Aging (Said et al., An inflammatory aging clock (iAge) based on deep learning tracks multimorbidity, immunosenescence, frailty and cardiovascular aging).
Researchers from the Buck Institute and Stanford University, as part of the 1000 Immunomes project, studied blood samples from 1001 people aged eight to 96 years. The aim of the project is to find out how the signs of chronic systemic inflammation change with age. Previously, the authors identified nine distinctive features of the aging process, now they have added a tenth – age-related dysfunction of the immune system, which, according to scientists, may be the most informative.
"It becomes obvious that with age we should pay more attention to the immune system, given that almost every age–related disease has inflammation as part of its etiology," the First actionable clock that predicts immunological health and chronic diseases of aging quotes the head of the study, Dr. David Furman, associate professor of the Institute, in a press release. Tank and the director of the 1000 Immunomes project. – With chronic inflammation, genomic instability occurs, as well as mitochondrial dysfunction and problems with protein stability. Systemic chronic inflammation causes telomere depletion, as well as epigenetic changes."
The authors identified a special biomarker of immune aging, chemokine CXCL9, in the immunome analyses of 1001 people. This protein, produced by the endothelium, helps activate T cells of the immune system. With age, as systemic inflammation increases, its release increases, which ultimately contributes to cellular aging and impaired blood vessel function.
However, some people show signs of systemic inflammation earlier, and others later. Using machine learning techniques, scientists have created an iAge immune clock algorithm based on the association of the level of CXCL9 protein in the blood with systemic inflammation – a program that allows not only to assess the state of the immune and cardiovascular system of a person and predict the rate of his aging in the future.
"There are very few standard immune indicators that could be used to identify people most at risk of developing one or more chronic aging diseases," says Dr. Furman. – Using an unbiased approach based on biology allowed us to identify a number of indicators, including a small immune protein that is involved in age-related systemic chronic inflammation and cardiac aging. Now we have the opportunity to detect age-related dysfunction at an early stage and intervene before the pathology occurs."
The results of the initial analysis were confirmed by scientists in an independent cohort of centenarians who participated in the Framingham Heart Study, which has been conducted in the United States since 1948, in a separate group of 97 extremely healthy people aged 25 to 90 years from California, as well as among centenarians in Bologna in Italy. Everywhere, the authors found a correlation between the level of the CXCL9 protein, vascular stiffness and premature aging.
According to the researchers, the iAge system measures the inflammatory load and predicts multiple diseases associated with aging, a decrease in immunity with age, and also explains the exceptional life expectancy of centenarians.
"On average, centenarians have an immune age about 40 years younger than what is considered normal. We have a separate case of a super-healthy 105-year–old man from Italy, whose immune system age is at the level of a 25-year-old man," Furman says.
The authors believe that based on the iAge system, it is possible to create a new method for identifying the risks of age-related diseases associated with a decrease in immunity.
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