It’s time you put away the calendar, forgot your birthday and stopped remembering how old you are.
“Every year, the calendar tells us we’re a year older,” said David Furman, Director of Stanford 1000 Immunomes Project in the Stanford University School of Medicine in Stanford, California.
“But not all humans age biologically at the same rate. You see this in the clinic — some older people are extremely disease-prone, while others are the picture of health.”
Furman and his team have developed an ‘inflammatory ageing clock’ which they say is more accurate in predicting how strong your immune system is, how soon you’ll become frail, or whether you have unseen heart problems that could become serious illness a few years ahead.
The immune system is a coordinated collection of cells, substances, and strategies with which deal with threats, such as injuries or invasions by microbial pathogens, and excels at mounting a quick, intense, localised, short-term, resist-and-repair response called acute inflammation or ‘good inflammation’ (an example is that red, swollen finger you see when you have a splinter, and the rapid healing that follows.)
But as people age, ‘bad inflammation’ begins to occur. The systemic and chronic inflammation causes organ damage and promotes vulnerability to a who’s who of diseases including cancer, heart attacks, strokes, neurodegeneration and autoimmunity.
The ‘inflammatory clock’ is designed to assess an individual’s inflammatory status in a way that could predict these clinical problems – and point to ways of addressing them or keeping them at bay.
In 2017, scientists assessed nearly 30 people aged 65 or older whose blood had been drawn in 2010. Inflammatory age proved superior to chronological age in predicting frailty seven years later, said Furman.
Next, Furman and his colleagues obtained blood samples from an ongoing study of exceptionally long-lived people in Bologna, Italy, and compared the inflammatory ages of 29 such people (all but one a centenarian) with those of 18 50- to 79-year-olds. The older people had inflammatory ages averaging 40 years less than their calendar age. One, a 105-year-old man, had an inflammatory age of 25, Furman states.
“Our inflammatory ageing clock’s ability to detect subclinical accelerated cardiovascular ageing hints at its potential clinical impact,” Furman concludes. “All disorders are treated best when they’re treated early.”
In short, prevention is key – so make sure you don’t miss that regular check-up.
