Inflammatory Diseases and Age Clock

Inflammatory diseases are a very big concern in this modern world where people die with a very short life span as compared to the prior generation of people. Inflammation is considered a vast array of disorders like transplant rejection, preperfusion injury, inflammatory bowel diseases, glomerulonephritis, coeliac disease, autoimmune diseases, asthma, and allergies.

The biological age of the body could be revealed with the help of the inflammation clock. According to research, chronic inflammation could be assessed with the help of a new kind of age clock that would be very helpful in predicting several risks of age-related disorders like neurodegenerative and cardiovascular diseases. This age clock is used for measuring the biological age of a person by considering their health that may be lower or higher in accordance with the chronological age of that person.

The iAge or the inflammatory aging clock is considered a kind of tool(an Artificial Intelligence algorithm) for assessing health with the help of inflammation. Epigenetic markers are being used by other age clocks. In simple words, the DNA of a person could be tagged by chemical groups in accordance to their aging as well as the division of cells they pass through. This intervention would benefit various people and this could be only determined by the doctors with the help of those inflammation treatable tools according to the developers and researchers of the iAge.

This will surely extend the lives of a person with good health to several numbers of years with potential effects. The most critical thing of a person is their immune system and therefore it is needed to be reinforced further. This is necessary for the biological age and the mechanism that drives the aging of that person as well as an unhealthy aging prediction in an efficient manner.

What is iAge?

Along with the aging of a person, systematic and chronic inflammation is experienced in their body. This inflammation in the body is the basis of iAge. Cells get damaged with a person’s age and inflammation is emitted by the inflammation-causing molecules. Therefore wear and tear is observed ultimately on the organs and tissue of a person when they age. Inflammation could be neutralized if a person has a very good and healthy immune system to some extent, on the other hand, people with weak immune systems will surely age faster as compared to them. Recently a team of researchers including some biologists and vascular specialists collected the samples of blood from different groups of people from 8-year kid to 96 years old and analyzed them.

This specific project was named the 1000 Immunomes Project that was made mainly to understand the systematic and chronic inflammation signature that changes with the aging of a person. The health information and chronological ages of each and every participant were thoroughly studied and analyzed and was implemented to a machine learning algorithm. This algorithm was mainly focused on identifying the blood protein markers of a person through which systematic inflammation could be signaled transparently. CXCL9 cytokine is considered as the immune signaling protein in a person’s body and it plays a very great significance in the research.

Cytokine is generally developed by the blood vessel’s inner lining and we may say that several heart diseases are developed and associated with it. They also tested this on few people who had lived for more than 99 years and the developed tools signifies that the centenarians live almost 40 years less than their actual age according to the iAge. Hence, we conclude that people with a healthy immune system are more likely to live longer as compared to the weak ones.

Research & Experiments

The health of a person in this modern living world could be briefly described by iAge. The indicator of a person’s health is the age clock. Research performed by various epigenetics states that there is still some hope in this field. But it is a very complicated task to measure the DNA’s epigenetic changes in relevance to the biological age of a person. However, a blood test could be considered a simple and easy technique for measuring the inflammation of a person’s health. Therefore, we can say that the best practice clinical tool for this purpose is the iAge and it has proved its significance in this field to some extent. We could also personalize several other treatments with the help of iAge and other tools based on the age clock. Human endothelial cells were observed to be formed when a group of scientists was examining the systematic and chronological inflammation with the help of CXCL9 as the biomarker. These cells are considered very important for developing blood vessel walls in the body in the form of a dish.

According to the result and observation of their experiment, they tried to divide them using the artificial technique that allowed them to repeat the division continuously. Cells were observed to be pushed by the high level of the proteins into a dysfunctional state. The encoder gene of CXCL9 was expressed silently, it was observed that some functions were regained by the cells. This observation motivated the researchers in understanding the harmful effects of proteins in the human body and hence they could work on developing a reversible technique to minimize the effect.

Application of iAge

Inflammation could be easily treated if it is observed and treated in its early period of time with the help of age clock tools. Scientists have developed a very advanced anti-inflammatory tool for targeting the biological process of the human body and they could easily gather several other knowledge and satisfactory results in the future. This could be better understood with the advantages of developed salicylic acid that is the aspirin’s precursor and JAK/STAT inhibitors that are very helpful in treating the rheumatoid arthritis-like inflammatory condition of a person. There are lots of other applications of the age clock for treating several inflammatory diseases and lots of knowledge could be gathered for developing drugs and remedies to fight such kinds of disease in this modern age.

References

Main Reference: Iruela-Arispe, M.L. An inflammatory clock for healthy aging. Nat Aging 1, 574–575 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43587-021-00085-9

Early J.O., Menon D., Wyse C.A., Cervantes-Silva M.P., Zaslona Z., Carroll R.G., Palsson-McDermott E.M., Angiari S., Ryan D.G., Corcoran S.E., et al. Circadian clock protein BMAL1 regulates IL-1β in macrophages via NRF2. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. 2018;115:E8460. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1800431115.

Javeed N., Brown M.R., Rakshit K., Her T., Sen S.K., Matveyenko A.V. Pro-inflammatory Cytokine Interleukin 1β Disrupts β cell Circadian Clock Function and Regulation of Insulin Secretion. Endocrinology. 2020;162 doi: 10.1210/endocr/bqaa084.

Kim S.M., Neuendorff N., Earnest D.J. Role of Proinflammatory Cytokines in Feedback Modulation of Circadian Clock Gene Rhythms by Saturated Fatty Acids. Sci. Rep. 2019;9:8909. doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-45322-9.

Kimberly H.C., Joseph S.T. Circadian clock genes and the transcriptional architecture of the clock mechanism. J. Mol. Endocrinol. 2019;63:R93–R102. doi: 10.1530/JME-19-0153.

Tsalamandris S., Antonopoulos A.S., Oikonomou E., Papamikroulis G.A., Vogiatzi G., Papaioannou S., Deftereos S., Tousoulis D. The Role of Inflammation in Diabetes: Current Concepts and Future Perspectives. Eur. Cardiol. 2019;14:50–59. doi: 10.15420/ecr.2018.33.1.

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