The passage of time may be linear, but the course of human aging is not. Rather than a gradual transition, your life staggers and lurches through the rapid growth of childhood, the plateau of early adulthood, to an acceleration in aging as the decades progress.
Now, a new study has identified a turning point at which that acceleration typically takes place: at around age 50.
After this time, the trajectory at which your tissues and organs age is steeper than the decades preceding, according to a study of proteins in human bodies across a wide range of adult ages – and your veins are among the fastest to decline.
"Based on aging-associated protein changes, we developed tissue-specific proteomic age clocks and characterized organ-level aging trajectories. Temporal analysis revealed an aging inflection around age 50, with blood vessels being a tissue that ages early and is markedly susceptible to aging," writes a team led by scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
