In today’s mostly plague- and famine-free world, if you can avoid more modern scourges like gun and car violence, you can expect your death to arrive not with a bang but a whimper; when one of your organs sput-sput-sputters out. And it is usually just one organ or organ system. For some, it’s a calcium-clogged heart. For others, kidneys that no longer filter. They might all work a little less well as we get older, but they don’t tend to fail all at once.
The work of geriatricians is basically to figure out which organ system in any given patient has furthest deteriorated and come up with a plan — drugs, surgeries, lifestyle changes — to put a few more good years on it. That job would be a lot easier if each of our organs came with an early warning indicator light — something that could flip on when a person is still healthy and relatively young.
With the right technology, it turns out they do, say scientists at Stanford University School of Medicine. In a study published Wednesday in Nature, they report a method for analyzing the varying rates at which organ systems age within the same person using the distinct proteins that those organs produce and shed into the blood.
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