18.08.2020 – 21:02
And where is your focus?
Exciting: Researchers discover 4 different types of aging
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Foto: iStock / MixMedia
Age as well as possible – we all want that! Can the assignment to the 4 aging types help?
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People age differently. While one has kidney problems, the other’s immune system deteriorates. Researchers have now found a possible explanation for this …
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For many people, getting old is a somewhat eerie idea: the youthful appearance disappears, the body loses strength and at some point the mental performance also declines … Wouldn’t it be nice if this process could be stopped or at least slowed down?
Well, the source of eternal youth has not yet been found. But the more we find out about this process, the more pleasant we can make it. A group of scientists from Stanford University in California has now probably made a contribution to this: The team led by geneticist Michael Snyder was able to work on a group of test subjects four different types of aging identify.
These are the four different types of aging
The study, which was published in the journal “Nature Medicine”, describes how 106 healthy women and men between the ages of 29 and 75 were followed over a period of several years. Later, the team focused on 43 subjects, who were extensively examined so that in the end there was a lot of data on their genes, proteins in the blood, cytokines (proteins that regulate the growth of cells, among other things), metabolic products and microbes. The scientists observed how these data changed during the course of the study and were able to identify both known and new markers that are associated with the aging process. Other aging markers were also identified, which vary from person to person.
On the whole, the researchers were able to assign the study participants to four different aging patterns: Each type of aging is associated with a certain physical process or organ: the immune system, the metabolism, the liver or the kidney.
A promising vision: Aging without suffering
The model of the different types of aging explains why people age so differently, why, for example, the liver deteriorates in some, while others struggle with the metabolic disorder diabetes in old age. But the results of the study could not only help us to better understand the process of aging, they could also play an important role in aging as healthy as possible and without suffering. According to Michael Snyder, a molecular assessment of the personal aging process that takes into account the lifestyle and medical history of the individual can help to observe and intervene in the individual aging process. Risk factors could thus be identified in good time and counteracted. If you change your lifestyle in good time, you could significantly slow down the aging process.
Of course, this discovery is only one step on the way to unlocking the mystery of aging. Not every test person could be assigned unequivocally to an aging type; others were mixed types. Michael Snyder also expects that there will be other types of aging in addition to these four. Information on this can only be provided by more and more extensive studies.
The full study can be found here: Personal aging markers and ageotypes revealed by deep longitudinal profiling
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