Scientists Say Your Body Starts Aging Faster After 50—but Not All Parts at Once

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Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

Aging doesn’t occur uniformly throughout our lives, but accelerates during certain periods.
A new study from scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences found 48 disease-related proteins increase throughout the body at around the age of 50.
This correlates with previous studies that found that human aging accelerated around the ages of 44 and the early 60s.

As soon as we’re born, we start aging, but scientists are quickly learning that not all aging is exactly the same.

A new study, led by a team of scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and published in the journal Cell, details how humans experience accelerated aging after the the age of 50. The study identified that certain tissues (i.e. blood vessels) experience this aging faster than others, and the scientists also identified the proteins responsible for this accelerated process.

“Based on aging-associated protein changes, we developed tissue-specific proteomic age clocks and characterized organ-level aging trajectories,” the authors write. “Temporal analysis revealed an aging inflection around age 50, with blood vessels being a tissue that ages early and is markedly susceptible to aging.”

In the study, scientists collected tissue samples across the body’s major organ systems from 76 individuals of Chinese ancestry—aged 14 to 68—who all died from accidental brain injury. The tissues showed that certain organs aged at different rates. The adrenal gland—one of the body’s hormone factories—showed accelerated aging at around the age of 30, and also saw an increase in 48 disease-related proteins as tissue samples trended older.

The scientists also spotted large changes in protein levels around the ages of 45 and 55. One of the biggest shifts was in the aorta, and scientists suspect that blood vessels carry these age-accelerating molecules throughout the body.

This isn’t the first study to surmise that aging isn’t quite as linear as we once thought. Last year, a study from Stanford University similarly confirmed that humans largely experience a period of accelerated aging at around 44 and the early 60s, which Stanford University’s Michael Snyder, a professor of genetics and the study’s senior author, surmised at the time could be related to aging. Speaking with Nature about this new study, Snyder says that the findings largely align with his own scientific conclusions.

“It fits the idea that your hormonal and metabolic control are a big deal. That is where some of the most profound shifts occur as people age,” Snyder said. “We’re like a car. Some parts wear out faster.”

Understanding what those parts are will help human mechanics (AKA doctors) to keep things under the hood running for longer. As scientists continue exploring the mechanics of aging, findings will likely converge and begin tell the story of how the body more generally experiences aging throughout a lifetime.

“Together, our findings lay the groundwork for a systems-level understanding of human aging through the lens of proteins,” the authors write.

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