How do researchers hope to understand healthy aging by the study of proteins?

Of course, you could scan their driver’s license or look for signs of facial wrinkles and gray hair. But, as researchers just found in a new study, you also could get pretty close to the answer by doing a blood test.

Woman looking at herself in mirror That may seem surprising. But in a recent study in Nature Medicine, an NIH-funded research team was able to gauge a person’s age quite reliably by analyzing a blood sample for levels of a few hundred proteins. The results offer important new insights into what happens as we age.

Explanation:

For example, the team suggests that the biological aging process isn’t steady and appears to accelerate periodically — with the greatest bursts coming, on average, around ages 34, 60, and 78