44 & 60 – Bad Ages To Be?

According to this article, which I suggest you read, human ageing happens at pretty precise points in life. Yeah, me too – I started looking for a date of April 1st – in fact the byline doesn’t even have a date, which makes me a trifle suss – but there’s no “ah ha! gotcha april fools!” anywhere in the article either.

I wouldn’t believe it possible that “Sharp molecular and microbial shifts occur precisely at ages 44 and 60, a finding that may alter our understanding of how our bodies age” but then again I remember looking in the mirror one day around age 44 and thinking “How’d I get to look so old alla sudden?” and it did happen again around age 60 – but being told this after you’ve passed the age marks is useless, since most of us can’t remember the exact day we had that particular thought.

I’m not so sure either that they can say that with such certainty. The age you were when your voice broke – that’s not the same year for every male. My voice just gradually shifted over the space of a few months without any embarrassing squeaks. My friend in primary school had his voice break while he was ten or eleven or something. He was embarrassed about being the only one in our class with a deep voice, I do remember that.

And either the journalist has taken slight liberties or the researcher has, because there’s a bit that claims that our immune systems change “in individuals entering their early 60s” – NOT “in their 60th year” which I’d allow but nope “entering their early 60s” to me is big enough for Mad Max to drive his entire crew though in a line abreast, come on!

Is it “precise” as in it occurs in the same 12mth period of life for everyone, or is it “entering their early 60s i.e. any time from age 59 to age 65” ???

They mention gut biomes, and that’s another thing that makes me wonder if this is all legit. If you move countries at age 33, your biome is going to change, nothing more certain. So can they point to specific populations in the biome that commit seppuku on your 44th birthday?

Seiously, the entire section on “Understanding the microbiome” is vague and doesn’t really connect with anything else, it just seems to be trying to establish that they know what a microbiome is, in which case whoop-de-shit, that doesn’t support anything else in the article, really. In fact. it brings up another hole. being that if the gut bacteria vary so much in composition, then how can the claim that they experienced dramatic changes at specific ages?

WHICH ONES? Seeing as someone may have that particular micro-organism and someone else may not, what happens to the latter person when that “specific age” has passed? It’s all bit loosey-goosey, and not clearly written. I mean – I can talk, with my scattershot approach to subjects, but I’m not a journalist nor a scientist and have had no formal training in documentation.

I’d rather have seen a sample size of more than 108 subjects, some idea of what country they lived in and what their circumstances were, because basing a Universal Unbreakable Rule on 108 people who were all born in the same year and the same town and only had access to a fairly region-specific diet is not a fair experiment.

Did you read the article? Did you follow the writer’s name to their profile? And is it or is it not so photoshopped or AI scripted as to be homogenous?

bloodtest https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/life/health/2024/08/26/test-predicts-age-related-diseases

If you enjoy my articles please share in your social networks. Please scroll down a little way and subscribe for the newsletter, and then scroll all the way to the bottom and make a donation to help me defray the running costs of this publication.

NOT FOR PUBLICATION YET! Add section below!

Article

US researchers have developed a blood test that looks at the health of 200 proteins in a person’s body to determine how fast they are ageing.

Specifically, it can predict the likelihood of you developing 18 age-related diseases, including dementia, heart disease, liver and kidney diseases, and various cancers.

The study of proteins and their interactions in a cell – and their potential accurately assessing human health – is called ‘proteomics’.

What the researchers have developed – using machine learning – is a proteomic biological clock.

The US researchers are already working on developing the test for clinical use, to make it available at your doctor’s office.

Dr Austin Argentieri is a research fellow in the Analytic and Translational Genetics Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital.

He is the lead author of a new study in Nature Medicine.

He told Medical News Today: “We envision that after a baseline test that tells you about your future health trajectory, you can work with your physician to make necessary steps to improve your health.

“And then when you take a new proteomic age test, any improvements or decline in your health will be reflected in new results.

“The hope is that you can use it as a continuous monitoring over time to check whether steps you’re taking to improve your health are having an overall positive impact across many different biological systems in your body”.

Biological ageing
Biological age is determined by the extent of damage you’ve accumulated at a cellular and physiological level over time.

Your biological age is determined by your diet, lifestyle (exercise, sleep and levels of stress), genetics and diseases you’ve experienced or continue to be plagued by.

Your chronological age is also a factor.

In April, we reported on a study that used nine biomarkers to show that the widely reported cancer spike in under-50s is driven by accelerated biological ageing.

The new clock
Most biological ageing clocks use DNA methylation, a kind of epigenetic switch, one of the mechanisms controlling expression of genes.

It has long been thought that a clock based on protein levels may provide a more accurate measure of biological health and function.

Once the human genome was mapped to great applause, researchers started looking more closely at the proteome, the entirety of proteins at work in our cells.

After all, proteins are fundamental to life.

As a 2007 paper explained: “Because proteome reflects more accurately on the dynamic state of a cell, tissue or organism, much is expected from proteomics to yield better disease markers for diagnosis and therapy monitoring.”

Dr Argentieri says “protein levels may provide a more direct mechanistic and functional insight into ageing biology. Moreover, the proteome is the most common target for drug development.”

However, previous proteomic age clock studies “have not been validated independently across populations with diverse genetic and geographic backgrounds”.

To address that issue, Argentieri and company developed a machine learning model that uses blood proteomic information to estimate a proteomic age clock in a large sample of participants from the UK Biobank (UKB)”.

This amounted to 45,441 people. aged 40 to 70.

He then validated the model in two other biobanks, one in China, the other in Finland.

These biobanks are “geographically and genetically distinct populations that have distinct age ranges and morbidity profiles from the UKB”.

The researchers identified “204 proteins that accurately predict chronological age”.

They further identified a set of 20 ageing-related proteins.

Argentieri said: “We demonstrated that our proteomic age clock showed similar age prediction accuracy in the independent participants from China and Finland compared with its performance in the UK Biobank.”

The researchers can use this information to then measure “how quickly you are ageing on a biological level by comparing how old your blood proteins predict you are versus your actual chronological age”.