Study suggests sex organs may help set the pace of aging elsewhere in the body

Aging may not move through the body at a single, steady pace. A study led by researchers at the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute suggests that reproductive organs could be linked to the timing of structural aging in other tissues. The researchers developed a system called the Pathology-based Structural Aging Rate framework to measure age-related changes in the physical organization of cells. Rather than relying mainly on chronological age or molecular changes to DNA, the method examines stained tissue samples for features associated with aging, including inflammation, reduced energy production and declining quality control. Using more than 25,000 post-mortem biopsies from nearly 1,000 adult donors, the team compared aging patterns across dozens of tissue types. The analysis found that organs followed markedly different trajectories. Blood vessels, for example, showed some of their fastest changes earlier in life, while the uterus accumulated more changes later. The ovaries displayed a more complicated pattern: structural aging increased during the thirties, declined during the forties, and rose again around menopause, according to the report in New Atlas. This type of pattern might have been missed by methods trained to track aging as a mostly linear process. The team then examined gene-expression and gene-regulation data from the same Genotype-Tissue Expression Project cohort. Researchers found coordinated aging patterns between tissues associated with sex hormones. People whose esophageal tissues showed signs of aging also tended to show a corresponding pattern in the prostate. Based on these findings, the researchers proposed that hormonal signaling may connect the aging of digestive and reproductive tissues. More than half of the tissues analyzed matched architectural changes observed in the ovaries, leading the team to suggest that sex organs may function as a kind of biological “pacemaker” for aging in other parts of the body. The findings do not establish that reproductive organs directly control the aging of other tissues. Instead, they identify a relationship that could help researchers investigate whether changes in one organ system might eventually be targeted to influence age-related deterioration elsewhere. The research was published in Nature Aging, according to New Atlas.