VERYWELL HEALTH – You might start aging faster once you turn 50.
A new study found that organ and tissue aging accelerates around this age. However, not everything declines at the same rate: blood vessels start aging even faster than other parts of the body.
The new study analyzed tissue samples from 76 organ donors who had accidental traumatic brain injuries between the ages of 14 and 68.
The samples included various parts of the body: the heart, lungs, intestines, pancreas, skin, muscle, blood, and adrenal glands, which are part of the endocrine system that produces hormones.
Adrenal tissues showed the earliest “aging signature” around age 30, which suggests endocrine imbalance may be an early driver of systemic aging, according to Guanghui Liu, PhD, a study author and professor at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Dramatic increases in aging were seen between the ages of 45 and 55. The aorta, the body’s largest blood vessel, changed the most, but the pancreas and spleen also had lasting changes during this period.
“The 45–55-year window emerges as a pivotal milestone, when most organ proteomes [a set of proteins] undergo a ‘molecular cascade storm’ with an explosive surge in differentially expressed proteins, marking the critical transition to systemic aging,” Liu told Verywell in an email.
More research is needed with larger sample sizes and additional organs, especially since the brain, kidneys, and reproductive system were not included in this study. Still, this proof of concept shows that “human aging can be analyzed, quantified, and potentially modulated through a protein-centric approach,” Liu said.
“The proteomic clocks are transforming the way we think about biological age,” Douglas Vaughan, MD, director of the Potocsnak Longevity Institute at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, told Verywell …
