Unlocking the Secrets of Aging: New Blood Test Reveals Organ Age and Disease Risk, ETHealthworld

June 16, 2026 Headlinesnews

New Delhi, Researchers have developed a blood-based indicator of age of an organ that can be used to assess its current age and predict the risk of a disease that might affect it 10 years later.

One’s biological age measures how well the body functions, compared to the chronological age. However, the organs inside the body are all said to be ageing at different speeds.

The researchers, including those from the US’ Stanford University, looked at 11 separate organ systems — brain, muscle, heart, lung, arteries, liver, kidneys, pancreas, immune system, intestine and fat.

“We’ve developed a blood-based indicator of the age of your organs. With this indicator, we can assess the age of an organ today and predict the odds of your getting a disease associated with that organ 10 years later,” senior author Tony Wyss-Coray, professor of neurology and neurological sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, said.

Findings published in the journal Nature Medicine showed that the biological age of one particular organ, the brain, plays an “outsized” role in determining how long an individual might live.

Nearly 45,000 people of ages 40 to 70 were randomly selected from the UK Biobank and monitored for up to 17 years for changes in their health status.

Using a commercially available lab technology, the researchers counted amounts of about 3,000 proteins in each participant’s blood. Around 15 per cent of the proteins could be traced to single-organ origins, and many others to multiple-organ generation.

An algorithm was developed that found how much the composite protein “signature” for each organ being assessed differed from the overall average for people of that age.

Thus, a biological age was assigned to each of the 11 distinct organs or organ systems assessed for each participant using ‘plasma proteomics’, a large-scale analysis of proteins circulating in the blood plasma.

One-third of the participants were found to have at least one organ that was either ‘extremely aged’ or ‘extremely youthful’, while one in four had multiple ‘extremely aged’ or ‘extremely youthful’ organs.

For the brain, ‘extremely aged’ translated to being among the 6-7 per cent of the study participants’ brains whose protein signatures fell at one end of the biological-age distribution, and ‘extremely youthful’ brains fell into the 6-7 per cent at the opposite end.

Further, the link between having an extremely aged brain and developing Alzheimer’s disease was found to be particularly powerful — 3.1 times that of one with a normally aging brain.

However, an extremely youthful brain was especially protective against Alzheimer’s — barely one-fourth that of a person with a normally aged brain, the researchers found.

“The brain is the gatekeeper of longevity. If you’ve got an old brain, you have an increased likelihood of mortality. If you’ve got a young brain, you’re probably going to live longer,” Wyss-Coray said.

Wyss-Coray added that brain age was the best single predictor of overall mortality.

Having an extremely aged brain increased the participants’ risk of dying by 182 per cent over a roughly 15-year period, while those with extremely youthful brains had an overall 40 per cent reduction in risk of dying over the same duration, he said.