Your molecules have a mid-life crisis, too
In a new study, scientists at Stanford University tracked age-related changes in over 135,000 types of molecules and microbes, sampled from over 100 adults. They discovered that shifts in their abundance — either increasing or decreasing in number — did not occur gradually over time, but clustered around two ages.
“Obviously you change throughout your entire life. But there are two major periods when there are lots of changes: One is when people hit their mid-40s, and one is they hit their 60s,” said Michael Snyder, a geneticist at Stanford University who co-wrote the study, in a phone interview. On average, the changes clustered around the ages of 44 and 60.
The peer-reviewed study, which published Wednesday in the journal Nature Aging, offers further evidence that the markers of age do not increase at a steady pace, but more sporadically. The focus on molecular change could also offer future researchers a clue into the drivers of age-related diseases, although it is too early to say precisely how molecular change is related to aging.
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