Blood test will tell how long we will live: study by a team from Yale University

A difficult topic to address that divides those who superstitiously would never want to know from those who instead claim to have his entire life under control, including the date of death.
Establishing how much longer we have to live has long been one of the great challenges of research and the latest study on the subject is that of an American team from Yale University which, thanks to nine biological markers present in the blood, claims to be able to evaluate a person's life expectancy, identifying a series of risk factors in their lifestyle. The researchers therefore rely on these nine biomarkers to calculate a person's biological age, which is then compared with their anagraphic age, as reported by the Guardian (data released online on Biorvix). If this biological (or phenotypic) age is higher than the real one, the individual ages faster than average and therefore has a higher risk of contracting diseases and dying prematurely. "Age is measured from a physiological point of view," explains Morgan Levine, a pathologist at Yale University and co-author of the study, to the Guardian. "You can be sixty-five but seventy physiologically, therefore with the mortality risk of a seventy-year-old." A difference that can be seen even in healthy people. To develop the test, scientists studied forty-two different clinical parameters, including white blood cell counts or glucose and albumin levels in the blood, correlated with medical records, lifestyle indications and death records of patients. Initially, they used data from ten thousand people to identify the parameters most closely linked to life expectancy. After identifying nine biological markers, they developed the test and performed it on another eleven thousand people. The researchers therefore observed that the higher the biological age was compared to the real one, the higher the risk of dying prematurely. It was also found that women seemed to age more slowly. The test can also provide information on what contributes to aging.
“The biggest benefit of all of this is being able to understand if someone is at high risk, and take all the precautions against the onset of a certain disease,” concludes Levine.