Diagnosis of ageing

Cancer is age related disease. We know that ageing is an inevitable process. Perhaps, someday it will  be officially included as disease in upcoming ICD-11 going to get updated in 2018.

And perhaps someday we will have better answers one the most sought after question: Is it possible to have long life? Or in other words Can we attain longevity? Although, there are important clues from nature about the long life For e.g. Hydra, Nake Mole Rat and others. We have examples like a Jeanne Louise Calment. She was the longest living human on earth. May be sometime in near future we will have answer to question of living longer life.

Jeanne Louise Calment 

122 year old lady

But to face this problem of ageing we must know how to diagnose it. We need reliable methods by which we can carry out diagnosis of ageing.

Crazy thought...It is ironic that if ageing is never been classified as disease then why do we need to diagnosis it? 

Moving towards an important idea of diagnosis of human ageing. A recent paper published by group of scientists in Genome Biology Journal developed a unique transcriptomic method for diagnosis of human ageing. The published article is open access please click here.

Paper claims to find a new method using statistically robust multi-tissue RNA signature from peripheral blood samples of human subject's healthy ageing that can be use for diagnosis of future health.

"Figure: 1 Development, validation and clinical application of ageing diagnostic. Overview of the selection process and use of RNA probe-sets for the development and validation of the healthy physiological age classifier. We identified useful probe-sets from a possible starting number of ~54,000 during step one [e.g. probe-sets with leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOCV) performance ≥ 90 %]. We then evaluated the performance of the top-ranked 150 probe-sets in a number of independent muscle, brain, and skin samples, demonstrating that the signature was diagnostic for age. We then applied the 150-probe-set healthy ageing signature to several clinical studies, as illustrated at the end of the workflow. Key features included discarding the training data set immediately after selecting the 150 probe-sets and relying on LOOCV and full external validation processes"

There is no commercial method available for diagnosis of human ageing. But may be this paper will provide an important step in the field of diagnosis of human ageing.