The results offer important new insights into what happens as we age. For example, the team suggests that the biological process of aging is not constant and seems to accelerate periodically and that the biggest explosions occur, on average, around 34, 60 and 78 years of age. With age, bones tend to reduce in size and density, weakening them and making them more susceptible to fractures. You might even get a little shorter.
Muscles generally lose strength, endurance, and flexibility, factors that can affect coordination, stability, and balance. Nowadays, most people can expect to live to be sixty or more. Every country in the world is experiencing growth both in size and in the proportion of older people in the population. At the biological level, aging is the result of the impact of the accumulation of a wide variety of molecular and cellular damage over time.
This leads to a gradual decline in physical and mental capacity, an increased risk of illness and, ultimately, death. These changes are not linear or consistent, and are only vaguely associated with a person's age in years. The diversity seen in old age is not random. Beyond biological changes, aging is often associated with other life transitions, such as retirement, relocation to more adequate housing, and the death of friends and partners.
A large part is due to people's physical and social environments and to the impact of these environments on their health opportunities and behavior. The relationship we have with our environment is biased by personal characteristics such as the family in which we were born, our sex and our ethnicity, which generates health inequalities. Your bones are stronger and denser when you're 30. Once again, you can maintain a high intake of calcium and vitamin D to keep your bones healthy for longer, but over time, they'll start to weaken.
Interestingly, when the system failed to predict an age that was too young, the subject tended to be very healthy for his age. In the study, 954 people born in 1972 or 1973 in Dunedin (New Zealand) agreed to participate in a study that followed them from age 26 to 38. Although this shift in the distribution of a country's population towards older ages — known as population ageing — began in high-income countries (for example, in Japan 30% of the population is already over 60 years old), it is now low- and middle-income countries that are experiencing the greatest change. The study measured plasma proteins collected from 4,263 adults between 18 and 95 years old and studied the changes in the proteome that occurred with age. The study, published in Nature Medicine, reveals that scientists can not only predict your age by studying the proteome (protein levels in the blood), but also determine which organs age faster than others and which age-related diseases your body is most susceptible to.
Your real age could be 40 years, but your expected age based on the body's proteomes could be below or above 40, depending on your health status. While these protein levels tend to remain relatively constant, the researchers found that large changes occurred in multi-protein readings around early adulthood (3 years), late middle age (60 years) and old age (7 years). Some people were biologically older and aged faster than others, despite having the same chronological age. Although some people really were biologically older than they are, the good news is that some were younger than their chronological age and were aging more slowly than they should.
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