On January 6, 2017, Anatomical Society’s open access journal, Aging Cell, published new research co-authored by 1998 Beeson Scholar Thomas Perls, MD, MPA, FACP, on biomarkers as indicators or predictors of aging.
In “Biomarker signatures of aging,” Perls and his co-authors posed:
Because people age differently, age is not a sufficient marker of susceptibility to disabilities, morbidities, and mortality. We measured nineteen blood biomarkers that include constituents of standard hematological measures, lipid biomarkers, and markers of inflammation and frailty in 4704 participants of the Long Life Family Study (LLFS), age range 30–110 years, and used an agglomerative algorithm to group LLFS participants into clusters thus yielding 26 different biomarker signatures. To test whether these signatures were associated with differences in biological aging, we correlated them with longitudinal changes in physiological functions and incident risk of cancer, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and mortality using longitudinal data collected in the LLFS.
The team found:
This analysis shows that various biomarker signatures exist, and their significant associations with physical function, morbidity, and mortality suggest that these patterns represent differences in biological aging. The signatures show that dysregulation of a single biomarker can change with patterns of other biomarkers, and age-related changes of individual biomarkers alone do not necessarily indicate disease or functional decline.
The article since has been picked up by popular outlets including New England Public Radio ,TechTimes , Yahoo, as well as Futurity, which shares discoveries from partner research institutions.
Read the complete study here.
Thomas Perls, MD, MPA, FACP, is a Professor of Geriatrics at Boston University School of Medicine and the founding director of the New England Centenarian Study. He is the author of the book Living to 100.
For more on Biomarkers, explore AFAR’s expert-edited InfoAging Guide on Biomarkers of Aging here.
