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Resilience identified as a new measure of biological age

June 21, 2021

A new paper published in May 2021 has identified declining resilience as a new measure of aging.
Studying data from thousands of subjects, scientists demonstrated that the human body’s ability to recover deteriorated with age and was entirely lost before the age of 150 years.
The researchers implied that solving this fundamental loss of resilience may hold the key to improved human lifespan.

Intensifying research in the field of longevity and gerontology aims to debunk the aging process and potentially yield interventions that could result in improved healthspan and lifespan. Previous research has identified genomic instability, epigenetic alternations, telomere shortening, deregulated nutrient sensing, proteostasis, mitochondrial dysfunction, stem cell exhaustion, cellular senescence, and altered intercellular communication as among the biological hallmarks of aging. Lifestyle factors such as sun exposure, smoking, alcohol consumption, exercise, and diet have also been known to play a role. But scientists have now added a new indicator of aging; resilience. Work completed by researchers at Singapore-based Gero demonstrated a constant ‘pace of aging’ that capped maximum human lifespan at between 120 and 150 years. This means that given a stressor-free environment and assuming that we escape the obvious hazards (such as disease) that do take our lives, a human being would still die due to a fundamental loss of resilience before the age of 150. The study, which was conducted in collaboration with researchers at the Roswell Park Cancer Center, was published in Nature Communications on May 25. GeroSense AI researchers used data collected from thousands of subjects in different countries. Two different biological measurements, blood cell counts, and physical activity (steps taken) told the same story as blood-based tests. The human body’s ability to recover seems to constantly deteriorate with age. This research goes a long way to capture the common experience of aging and the frailty and comorbidities near life’s end. It gets harder to recover from illness, physical exertion, alcohol consumption, and lack of sleep as we age. While it takes two weeks for a 40-year-old healthy adult to return to a ‘normal state’ after stress, an 80-year-old will need six weeks. Extrapolation of this data shows a complete loss of resilience in the human body at 120-150 years of age. The study’s authors say the paper improves understanding of aging and adds to the body of knowledge on longevity research. “The present work proves there is a good differentiation between a person’s growth phase, mostly complete by the age of 30, and aging,” said Dr. Tim Pyrkov, the study’s first author and a researcher at Gero. “At the age of 35 we observed the onset of aging, which manifests itself as a slow (linear, sub-exponential) deviation of physiological signals from their reference values.” “This work, in my opinion, is a conceptual breakthrough because it determines and separates the roles of fundamental factors in human longevity – the aging, defined as progressive loss of resilience, and age-related diseases, as “executors of death” following the loss of resilience. It explains why even the most effective prevention and treatment of age-related diseases could improve only the average but not the maximal lifespan – unless true anti-aging therapies have been developed,” said Professor Andrei Gudkov, the study’s co-author and senior Vice President at the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center. Recognized researchers from across the aging field have also hailed the work as a step in the right direction. “The investigation shows that recovery rate is an important signature of aging that can guide the development of drugs to slow the process and extend healthspan,” said Dr. David Sinclair, a Harvard Medical School professor of genetics. Professor Brian Kennedy, a leading biochemist at the National University of Singapore, said, “This work by the Gero team shows that longitudinal studies provide novel possibilities for understanding the aging process and systematic identification of biomarkers of human aging in large biomedical data. The research will help to understand the limits of longevity and future anti-aging interventions. What’s even more important, the study may help to bridge the rising gap between the health- and life-span, which continues to widen in most developing countries.” The research clearly demonstrated that the body’s resilience (ability to recover) can be accurately measured and is associated with the onset of chronic disease and increased risk of all-cause mortality. Solving this fundamental loss of resilience may hold the key to unlocking a dramatic life-extending therapy.

References: https://www.longevity.technology/targeting-resilience/

Resilience identified as a new measure of biological age

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