"Molecular aging is dynamic and unique to each person," said study co-author Julia El-Sayed Moustafa, a computational genomics researcher at King's College London. Even if you and your friend were born the same day, the activity of some of your genes might ramp up while the same genes in your friend dial down. The same is true for metabolites, which are small molecules produced during the body's chemical processes essential for health.
The findings, published Thursday (Sept. 3) in the journal Science, may complicate efforts to capture aging with a single metric. For example, "biological age" scores estimate the body's true cellular and physical health, judging how much "older" it is than your chronological age. Scientists have developed "aging clocks" that use molecular markers, such as chemical tags on DNA, to estimate biological age.
In the study, researchers followed 335 women ages 32 to 80 from the long-running TwinsUK cohort for eight years. The cohort includes identical and fraternal twin pairs, along with detailed health and biological data gathered to investigate how genetics and environment can influence health.
"Most aging studies take only a 'snapshot,' comparing different people at one point in time," El-Sayed Moustafa said. "In this study, we have multiple measurements, so we can see how gene activity and metabolite levels change over time within the same person."
The study pulled data from the TwinsUK cohort, which in total includes over 15,000 identical and fraternal twins from across the U.K. (This is a stock image.) (Image credit: MesquitaFMS via Getty Images)Many of these genes were involved in pathways linked to immune function, metabolism and age-related conditions, including heart disease and neurodegenerative disorders.
Among 136 metabolites, for example, the levels changed from person to person. A metabolite that increased in one woman could fall in another, while some showed little change over time. One consistent pattern was that each woman's overall metabolite profile also became less similar to her earlier profile.
What might shape those changes?
The molecular signals also varied with the time of day and season in which the blood samples were collected. About a quarter of the genes and metabolites showed seasonal shifts, including changes linked to energy production and immune activity, while up to 40% of the metabolites varied with the body's 24-hour internal clock.
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"I would not call aging unpredictable, but it is certainly more individualized and context-dependent," Sehgal said. Understanding these individual trajectories could one day help researchers distinguish healthy aging from molecular changes linked to disease, but that application is still a long way off.
The study was observational, included only women and relied solely on blood samples, so larger and more diverse studies are still needed to see whether these patterns hold in broader populations. The researchers now plan to track molecular changes over about 15 years, up from eight in the current study. In the future, Sehgal suggested, aging assessments could combine broad, biological-age scores with more personalized measures of immune, metabolic, brain and cardiovascular aging.
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