Science Translational Medicine’s Oct. 14 issue announcement highlights a large metabolomics study of aging. The work asks whether patterns in small molecules circulating in blood can estimate how quickly a person’s body is aging, and whether that estimate tracks later health outcomes.
What the researchers measured
The study’s associated dataset record covers 18,476 participants ages 1 to 96 from six centers in China. Researchers analyzed fasting plasma with mass spectrometry and identified 56 age-associated metabolite features.
They used a healthy training cohort of 5,252 people to build an ensemble model that estimated “metabolomic age.” A second healthy cohort of 5,456 people was used for validation. The researchers defined metabolomic age acceleration as the gap between that estimate and a participant’s chronological age.
The record also describes a separate diseased validation cohort of 7,768 people. For that group, the team developed a mortality-linked measure of how far a participant’s metabolite-based risk departed from the level expected for their age.
What the clocks were associated with
In the healthy cohorts, faster metabolomic aging was associated with poorer health measures and unfavorable lifestyle factors. Over 5.5 years of follow-up, accelerated metabolomic age was also associated with higher incidence of chronic diseases including cancer, hypertension and diabetes, as well as higher all-cause mortality.
In the diseased cohort, larger age deviations were associated with worse composite health measures, involvement of more organ systems and a greater burden of multiple diseases.
Those results make the models potentially useful as research tools, but they do not show that the metabolite patterns cause disease. The public dataset record does not establish how well a model developed from six centers in China would generalize to other populations or clinical settings. It includes the study abstract and dataset description, but not the full numerical effect estimates needed to judge performance in detail.
The issue’s other highlighted therapy
The journal’s issue announcement also says a new mRNA antibody therapy could better address evolving SARS-CoV-2 variants. The announcement does not provide the therapy’s mechanism, study stage or efficacy results, so that point remains a qualified preview rather than evidence that the treatment is proven or available.
