Moffitt Terrie E, Belsky Daniel W, Danese Andrea, Poulton Richie, Caspi Avshalom
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience and
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.
J Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci. 2017 Feb;72(2):210-215. doi: 10.1093/gerona/glw191. Epub 2016 Oct 7.
To prevent onset of age-related diseases and physical and cognitive decline, interventions to slow human aging and extend health span must eventually be applied to people while they are still young and healthy. Yet most human aging research examines older adults, many with chronic disease, and little is known about aging in healthy young humans.
This article explains how this knowledge gap is a barrier to extending health span and puts forward the case that geroscience should invest in researching the pace of aging in young adults. As one illustrative example, we describe an initial effort to study the pace of aging in a young-adult birth cohort by using repeated waves of biomarkers collected across the third and fourth decades to quantify the pace of coordinated physiological deterioration across multiple organ systems (eg, pulmonary, periodontal, cardiovascular, renal, hepatic, metabolic, and immune function).
Findings provided proof of principle that it is possible to quantify individual variation in the pace of aging in young adults still free of age-related diseases.
This article articulates research needs to improve longitudinal measurement of the pace of aging in young people, to pinpoint factors that slow or speed the pace of aging, to compare pace of aging against genomic clocks, to explain slow-aging young adults, and to apply pace of aging in preventive clinical trials of antiaging therapies. This article puts forward a research agenda to fill the knowledge gap concerning lifelong causes of aging.
为预防与年龄相关疾病的发生以及身体和认知能力的衰退，减缓人类衰老和延长健康寿命的干预措施最终必须应用于尚年轻且健康的人群。然而，大多数人类衰老研究关注的是老年人，其中许多人患有慢性病，而对于健康年轻人的衰老情况知之甚少。
本文解释了这一知识空白如何成为延长健康寿命的障碍，并提出老年科学应投入研究年轻人衰老速度的观点。作为一个示例，我们描述了一项初步尝试，即通过利用在三十多岁和四十多岁期间多次收集的生物标志物，对一个年轻成人出生队列的衰老速度进行研究，以量化多个器官系统（如肺部、牙周、心血管、肾脏、肝脏、代谢和免疫功能）协调生理衰退的速度。
研究结果提供了原理证明，即有可能量化尚未患与年龄相关疾病的年轻人衰老速度的个体差异。
本文阐明了研究需求，包括改进对年轻人衰老速度的纵向测量、确定减缓或加速衰老速度的因素、将衰老速度与基因组时钟进行比较、解释衰老缓慢的年轻人以及在抗衰老疗法的预防性临床试验中应用衰老速度。本文提出了一项研究议程，以填补有关衰老终生原因的知识空白。
