Tendency to longevity can be determined by blood test
Scientists compared the blood of people who lived to be 100 years old and their peers with shorter life expectancies. This analysis showed a person's chances for a long life, reports Science.
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How long people can live and what determines a long and healthy life has interested us all our lives. Plato and Aristotle discussed and wrote about the aging process more than 2300 years ago. However, understanding the secrets of exceptional longevity is not easy. It involves uncovering the complex interplay of genetic predisposition and lifestyle factors and how they interact throughout a person's life.
A recent study published in GeroScience, identified some common biomarkers, including cholesterol and glucose levels, in people living past 90 years of age.
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Centenarians have long been of great interest to scientists as they could help us understand how to live longer and perhaps also how to age better. Until now, studies of centenarians have often been small and focused on a select group, for example excluding centenarians living in nursing homes.
Huge data set
The new study is the largest study to date comparing biomarker profiles. They were measured across the lifespan among exceptionally long-lived individuals and their shorter-lived peers.
The study included data from 44 Swedes who completed a health survey aged 000–64 years.
These participants were then followed in a Swedish registry for 35 years. Of these people, 1224, or 2,7%, lived to be 100 years old. The vast majority (85%) of centenarians were women.
Twelve blood biomarkers related to inflammation, metabolism, liver and kidney function, as well as potential malnutrition and anemia were included in the study. All of these have been associated with aging or mortality in previous studies.
The biomarker associated with inflammation was uric acid, a waste product produced by the body when certain foods are digested.
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The scientists also looked at markers associated with metabolic status and function, including total cholesterol and glucose, as well as markers associated with liver function, such as alanine aminotransferase (ALT), aspartate aminotransferase (ASAT), albumin, gamma-glutamyltransferase (GGT), alkaline phosphatase . (Alp) and lactate dehydrogenase (LD).
They also looked at creatinine, which is associated with kidney function, and iron and total iron-binding capacity (TIBC), which is associated with anemia. Finally, the researchers also looked at albumin, a biomarker associated with nutrition.
What conclusions did the scientists come to?
The scientists found that overall, those who lived into their century tended to have lower levels of glucose, creatinine and uric acid starting in their sixties. Although median values for most biomarkers did not differ significantly between centenarians and noncentenarians, centenarians rarely exhibited extremely high or low values.
For example, very few centenarians started life with a glucose level above 6,5 or a creatinine level above 125.
The values of many biomarkers in both centenarians and noncentenarians were outside the range considered normal in clinical guidelines. This is likely due to the fact that these recommendations were developed with a younger, healthier population in mind.
When examining which biomarkers were associated with the likelihood of reaching 100 years of age, the researchers found that all but two of the 12 biomarkers (alate and albumin) showed an association with the likelihood of reaching 100 years of age. This was even after controlling for age, sex and disease burden.
People in the five groups with the lowest levels of total cholesterol and iron were less likely to live to age 100 compared with people with higher levels. Meanwhile, people with higher levels of glucose, creatinine, uric acid and liver function markers also have a reduced chance of surviving to a century.
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In absolute terms, the differences were quite small for some biomarkers, while for others the differences were somewhat larger.
For example, for uric acid the absolute difference was 2,5 percentage points. This means that people in the group with the lowest uric acid levels had a 4% chance of living to be 100, while those in the group with the highest uric acid levels only had a 1,5% chance of living to be 100.
Even if the differences the scientists found were quite small overall, they suggest a potential link between metabolic health, nutrition and exceptional longevity.
The study, however, does not allow any conclusions to be drawn about which lifestyle factors or genes are responsible for the biomarker values.
However, it is reasonable to assume that factors such as diet and alcohol consumption play a role. Monitoring your kidney and liver counts, as well as your glucose and uric acid levels as you get older, is probably a good idea. However, chance probably plays a role in reaching advanced age at some point. But the fact that differences in biomarkers can be observed long before death suggests that genes and lifestyle may also play a role.
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