(Michelle Starr’s post from the SCIENCE ALERT on 28 July 2025.)
Study Reveals Turning Point
When Your Body's Aging Accelerates: 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. "Together, our findings lay the groundwork for a systems-level understanding of human aging through the lens of proteins."