Every person has biological characteristics (biomarkers) that can change over the course of life. They give doctors information about the state of health, aging processes and emerging diseases. In order for them to be used optimally in the clinic, they should be standardized and collected as comprehensively as possible, said Innsbruck researcher Chiara Herzog. Together with colleagues, she presented guidelines for the standardization of biomarkers in the journal “Nature Medicine”.
Classic biomarkers include blood sugar levels, body temperature and weight. In modern medicine and research, a wide variety of molecules in the body are also recorded and evaluated, such as blood metabolites, proteins, risk genes (e.g. for breast cancer) and “epigenetic” changes in the genome that influence the reading of genes.
“The use of biomarkers to assess biological aging can help predict life expectancy and quality of life,” said medical researcher Herzog, who works at the “European Translational Oncology Prevention and Screening Institute” at the University of Innsbruck, in a press release. It shows an increase in molecular and cellular damage over time. However, how reliable the significance of the various biomarkers is is not uniformly recorded and validated (checked for validity), she criticized: “But this is a necessary process to ensure accurate and reliable results in the clinic.”
Better predictions through “multi-omics”
The researchers recommend that as many biomarkers as possible should be recorded in each person at the same time, such as blood metabolites, proteins and genetic changes. “This ‘multi-omics’ approach would provide greater insight into the predictive power of biomarkers,” they explained. In addition, aging biomarkers should be linked and researched with other health factors such as frailty, loss of (physical) function, chronic diseases and disabilities. The data and test methods should also be standardized. They have developed guidelines for this.
Service: – Study online: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-023-02784-9