A Blood Test Could Reveal Your Risk for Disease As You Age

Everyone ages differently, but someone’s age can still provide a good sense of their risk for different health issues and chronic conditions. If you’ve been reading a lot about biological age versus chronological age lately, this is also why: some scientists believe that by determining a person’s biological age, they can make educated guesses about how likely they are to develop a host of ailments.

Just how well someone’s biological age can predict someone’s health issues later in life is at the center of a paper recently published in Nature Medicine. The studies’ authors drew upon data from the U.K. Biobank, ultimately focusing on 204 different proteins that have an effect on how we age. They also confirmed the results from other large-scale biobanks in China and Finland.

The scientists went on to, as they phrased it, find that this form of aging is connected to “the incidence of 18 major chronic diseases (including diseases of the heart, liver, kidney and lung, diabetes, neurodegeneration and cancer), as well as with multimorbidity and all-cause mortality risk.”

In an article published at Nature that coincides with the paper’s publication, Julian Nowogrodzki explained how the blood analysis works. As Nowogrodzki phrased it, “[p]eople whose protein-clock age was higher than their chronological age” were at a higher risk for the 18 diseases mentioned above than people for whom the reverse was true.

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The study’s lead author, Massachusetts General Hospital’s Austin Argentieri, emphasized one important conclusion from these findings. “Ultimately, wanting to live longer will come down to preventing chronic diseases,” Argentieri told Nature. If there’s a way to slow down biological aging, that may play a key part in those prevention efforts.