Researchers find that a substance indicating oxidative damage increases in urine as people get older. The study, published today in open-access journal in
Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, also describes a way to easily measure levels of this marker in human urine samples.
Just take a look around: we all know people who look young for their age, or folks who seem prematurely wizened. Even in an individual, different parts of the body can age at different speeds. By examining how chronological age lines up with
biological age across the population, researchers are starting to pin down how these two measures should sync up -- and what it means for how long we have left when they don't.
The new marker potentially provides a method to measure how much our body has aged -- our biological rather than chronological age. This could help predict our risk of developing age-related disease, and even our risk of death.
Short of miraculous anti-aging treatments, understanding more about biological age can still improve our health. People told their heart age -- measured using parameters such as blood pressure and cholesterol -- are
better able to lower their risk of cardiovascular problems compared with people given standard information about heart health, for instance.
While everyone born in the same year has the same chronological age, the bodies of different people age at different rates. This means that, although the risk of many diseases increases with age, the link between our age in years and our health and lifespan is relatively loose. Many people enjoy long lives, relatively free of disease, while others suffer chronic illness and premature death.
So, if our age in years isn't the most reliable indicator of aging in our bodies, what is?
Some researchers consider normal aging to be a disease, where our cells accumulate damage over time. The rate of this cellular damage can vary from person to person, and may be dictated by genetics, lifestyle and the environment we live in. This cellular damage may be a more accurate indication of our biological age than the number of years since we were born.
Finding a way to measure biological age could help to predict the risk of developing age-related disease and even death. We also need to be able to measure biological age to know whether treatments to slow aging -- which may be possible in the future -- are effective.
One mechanism thought to underlie biological aging involves a molecule vital to our survival -- oxygen -- in what is called the free radical theory of aging.
"Oxygen by-products produced during normal metabolism can cause oxidative damage to biomolecules in cells, such as DNA and RNA," explains Jian-Ping Cai, a researcher involved in the study.
"As we age, we suffer increasing oxidative damage, and so the levels of oxidative markers increase in our body."One such marker, with the catchy name of 8-oxo-7,8-dihydroguanosine -- or 8-oxoGsn for short -- results from oxidation of a crucial molecule in our cells called RNA. In previous studies in animals, Cai and colleagues found that
8-oxoGsn levels increase in urine with age.To see if this is true for humans as well, the researchers measured 8-oxoGsn in urine samples from 1,228 Chinese residents aged 2-90 years old, using a rapid analysis technique called ultra-high-performance liquid chromatography.
"We found an age-dependent increase in urinary 8-oxoGsn in participants 21 years old and older." said Cai. "Therefore, urinary 8-oxoGsn is promising as a new marker of aging."
Interestingly, levels of 8-oxoGsn were roughly the same between men and women, except in post-menopausal women, who showed higher levels. This may have been caused by the decrease in estrogen levels that happens during menopause, as estrogen is known to have anti-oxidant effects.
The team's rapid analysis technique could be useful for large-scale aging studies, as it can process urine samples from up to 10 participants per hour.
"Urinary 8-oxoGsn may reflect the real condition of our bodies better than our chronological age, and may help us to predict the risk of age-related diseases," concludes Cai.
Reader Comments
Life is stranger than fiction, or maybe it's science fiction.
Social adaptation to strain and struggle seeks to optimise a falsely founded and framed life. Chemical restraint and suppressions of biochemical communication channels may preserve a sterile sense of existence. Assigning dependencies to complex technological support structure invites abuse (pharming) of dependency.
The shift from the mind-matrix to the heart-nowing is inherently challenging as the conscious recognition and release of conflict and the defences of a conflict-based identity.
Conflict aversion fears change and transformation and identifies in defensive machinery. But the fear of conflict is assigned to change as a result of dissociation in defences that trigger old patterns without new or current conscious relation and re-vision.
Intuitive aliveness is already the ability to 'reality-test' in terms of result. The focus in the idea of creating private reality is identified in struggle within results and so cannot read its own thought-feeling-event. Or rather, inherently misreads its reality as subjection and subjective dissociation - ie private reality experience or 'time out from Everything' as a personal or special sense of existence and relation.
The exploration within the experience of dramatic entanglement is open to the movement to unfold the idea. Down the rabbit hole to time and timings that hold the tragi-comedy of errors and terrors of a sense of lack, given power.
The fear is, that to release the ego-avatar is to die or worse; (trapped in pain-time for which death is called on as saviour).
But the awareness of ego-avatar in act is awareness stirring beneath or 'upstream' to the consciousness of self and world - that instantly transforms such consciousness incrementally and radically as a whole - because it is the expression of wholeness in all its parts - and not a partiality of 'sides'.
So thinking can embody a narrative continuity set in attempt to control drama, or the free flowing of an unspoken intimacy that is always presencing itself through the chosen or accepted relations rather than set as a goal at the end of a sacrifice of presence to the attainment of reward. The reward for sacrificing joy to time-pain is already noted. Victory over a hated or rejected life (even if the hate is projected onto external agents besetting a relative innocence), is death - whether the body is kept running or released.
The idea of being trapped mind in a body/world is many faceted, but involves object continuity, and identity in the body/world as subjected to causes beyond control, and so seeks to enlarge control as the development of its 'consciousness'. Insofar as powers are brought forth from a manipulative intent, they are always 'shared' as a means to then operate greater control over and by the idea that focuses in the body as a means to separate and dominate or take from.
So if longevity is attainable, the version pushed mainstream will be some form of dependency management. Take this medication or die! However, finding and being your own life is not signing any patent pact and growing the nowing of being is inherently the releasing of the attempt to force anything anywhere - although forceful communication is simply being clear to the need of the situation at hand.
Perhaps releasing the mindset of the tricks we learned, in learning anew becomes less attractive to the aged by experience. Learning and aspiration or active interest and desire opens the time in which to fulfil itself. Living as if we haven't enough time or are unworthy of fulfilment pushes or holds back and looses its natural timing.
I have an idea of a fluidity of access to any biological age as a current channel of expression - but this is speaking of the qualities of experience of the phases of life - not a dying body.
The embalming of the living is evident in Hollywood and other 'celebrities'. Beauty is an inside job, and the radiance of life communicates qualities that are non physical, as a felt appreciation and not a set of markers getting ticked - or crossed.