To prevent onset of age-related diseases and physical and cognitive decline, interventions to slow human aging and extend health span must eventually be applied to people while they are still young and healthy. Yet most human aging research examines older adults, many with chronic disease, and little is known about aging in healthy young humans.
This article explains how this knowledge gap is a barrier to extending health span and puts forward the case that geroscience should invest in researching the pace of aging in young adults. As one illustrative example, we describe an initial effort to study the pace of aging in a young-adult birth cohort by using repeated waves of biomarkers collected across the third and fourth decades to quantify the pace of coordinated physiological deterioration across multiple organ systems (eg, pulmonary, periodontal, cardiovascular, renal, hepatic, metabolic, and immune function).
Findings provided proof of principle that it is possible to quantify individual variation in the pace of aging in young adults still free of age-related diseases.
This article articulates research needs to improve longitudinal measurement of the pace of aging in young people, to pinpoint factors that slow or speed the pace of aging, to compare pace of aging against genomic clocks, to explain slow-aging young adults, and to apply pace of aging in preventive clinical trials of antiaging therapies. This article puts forward a research agenda to fill the knowledge gap concerning lifelong causes of aging.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 10. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 13 January 2020.
All research outputs
#4,877,577
of 34,364,397 outputs
Outputs from Journals of Gerontology Series A: Biological Sciences & Medical Sciences
#1,503
of 4,821 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#59,218
of 337,342 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Journals of Gerontology Series A: Biological Sciences & Medical Sciences
#23
of 56 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 34,364,397 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done well and is in the 85th percentile: it's in the top 25% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 4,821 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 19.3. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 68% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 337,342 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done well, scoring higher than 82% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 56 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 58% of its contemporaries.
