Everyone’s organs age at a different rate. Blood test can pinpoint risks

A certain organ or organs might be growing old faster than the rest of a person’s body, placing them at increased risk for disease and death, a new study suggests.

About one in every five reasonably healthy people age 50 or older have at least one organ aging at an accelerated rate, researchers recently reported in the journal Nature.

That sounds bad, but it also opens up an opportunity for better health, researchers say. A simple blood test might tell which organs are aging rapidly, so doctors can start treating potential diseases related to that organ.

“We can estimate the biological age of an organ in an apparently healthy person,” said senior researcher Tony Wyss-Coray, a professor of neurology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. “That, in turn, predicts a person’s risk for disease related to that organ.”

For the study, Wyss-Coray and his team examined nearly 5,700 people using an array of biomarkers to imply “biological ages” for 11 key organ systems or tissues within them, including the heart, fat, lungs, immune system, kidney, liver, muscle, pancreas, brain, blood vessels and intestines.

These “biological ages” are often different from the actual number of years that have passed since a person’s birth, WyssCoray said.

Researchers found that more than 18% of people 50 and older had at least one organ aging significantly more rapidly than the average, Wyss-Coray said.

Only about 1 in 60 people had two organs that were rapidly aging, but they had 6.5 times the risk of death than someone without any such organs, results showed.

Having an organ aging faster than the rest of the body carried a 15% to 50% higher risk of death over the next 15 years, depending on the affected organ.

People with rapidly aging hearts had 2.5 times as high a risk of heart failure as people with normally aging hearts, results showed.

Accelerated aging of the brain or blood vessels predicted risk of Alzheimer’s disease as well as the best existing biomarkers, researchers found.