Abstract
The concept of biological age has been used more and more frequently in aging research in attempts to measure the progress of the biological aging process as opposed to the simple passage of time. Several approaches to quantify biological age have been utilized, including the use of biomarkers in the form of serum analytes, epigenetic markers, and deficit or frailty indices. Among these methods, the deficit index possesses a theoretical basis grounded in systems biology by incorporating networks, with their emergent properties, to describe the complex aging system. Application of the deficit index in human aging studies points to the increased energetic demands posed by an aging system that is losing integration. Different aspects of mitochondrial function appear to be responsible in males and females. The gut microbiome loses complexity in tandem with the host, as biological age increases, with likely impact on host metabolism and immunity. Specific DNA methylation changes are associated with biological age. They suggest declining connectivity within the aging network, at the cellular level. The deficit/frailty index may account for at least part of the departure at older ages of the observed mortality in the population from the exponential increase modeled by the Gompertz equation.
Highlights
Even to the untrained eye it has always been apparent that different people age differently
The richness (α-diversity) or intra-individual variation in the gut microbiota declines as a function of biological age (FI34), while showing little or no difference with chronological age (Maffei et al, 2017)
These co-abundance networks may be responsible for the metabolic changes and inflammatory responses that are characteristic of unhealthy aging by disrupting the beneficial interactions of the gut microbiome with host signaling pathways
Summary
Tulane Center for Aging, Department of Medicine, Tulane University Health Sciences Center, New Orleans, LA, United States. Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas, Greece. Specialty section: This article was submitted to Genetics of Aging, a section of the journal
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