A "clock" based on around 200 proteins in the blood can predict the risk of 18 chronic diseases, including Heart diseases , Krebs, diabetes and Alzheimer's disease .

The accuracy of the watch suggests the opportunity to develop a single test that could describe the risk of a person for many chronic diseases, says the senior scientist of the Austin Argentieri project, a researcher for population health at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. "Ultimately, the desire to live longer, lead to preventing chronic diseases," he says. The study was published on August 8th in Nature Medicine 1 .

well aged

The chronological age of a person is crucial for determining their risk for many age -related diseases. But chronological age is not a perfect predictor of diseases. For example, some 60-year-olds are weak and suffer from heart diseases while others are healthy.

Argentieri and his colleagues tried to build a “clock” that would exactly reflect a person's disease status. To do this, they used data from 45,441 randomly selected people in UK Biobank, a repository for biomedical samples . This sample size is about 30 times larger than that used in an earlier protein watch study, which makes it more statistically meaningful.

The team found that the levels of 204 proteins predict the chronological age. It is noteworthy that the authors created a second o'clock that only used the 20 most meaningful proteins, and that it predicted the age almost as well as the 204 protein clock. The 20 proteins included elastin and collagen that form the support structure between cells, as well as proteins that are involved in the immune response and hormone regulation.

The clock also said the chronological age in two other groups of people: almost 4,000 contributors to a bioank in China and almost 2,000 contributors to a bioank in Finland. Early protein -based watches considered data from more homogeneous populations, say the researchers.

The age, which was measured with the protein clock, was generally measured similar to chronological age. But with some people there was a discrepancy between the two - which indicates that the protein levels change when an illness develops. People whose protein clock age was higher than their chronological age, with a greater probability of 18 chronic diseases, including Diabetes , neurodegenerative diseases, cancer, as well as diseases of the heart, the liver, the kidney and the lungs. The protein watch age was also associated with physical frailty, slow response time and premature death.

The proteins of other people age more slowly than the average. It is unclear whether this is due to environmental factors, genetics or a combination of it. Of the 10% of the participants in the study, which were "the slowest aging", says Argentieri, "less than 1% developed dementia or Alzheimer's".

turn the clock back?

The strengths of the study include their great data record and their successful replication in various populations, says molecular epidemiologist Sara Hägg at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. "It's a very robust study," she says.

Argentieri and his colleagues want to add more geographical and genetic diversity to their training data. The limiting factor, says Argentieri, is the lack of protein data in biobanks with diverse populations. The authors also examine the use of their protein clock to test whether new medical treatments avert age-related suffering "without having to wait a decade or two to see if someone is developing a chronic illness," says Argentieri.

Finally,

they are looking for environmental and behavioral factors that affect how quickly proteins age in the body. "Ok, you can tell me about my future risk for 18 different diseases," says Argentieri. "But can I do something to change this course?"