A simple blood test can reveal your biological age – your height, weight, and some general appearance features.
New discoveries made by Swedish researchers at Uppsala University could benefit future medical care and crime scene investigations.
Biological Age
The researchers have discovered that through a simple blood test, many factors about a person can be revealed, such as how this individual’s lifestyle affects his or her biological age.
Your biological age isn’t necessary your real age, as many lifestyle variables age you faster; smoking, lots of sugar and stress etc. Others slower, regular exercise and a healthy diet etc. The difference in biological age and real age can be many years.
The researcher’s note;
We found smoking, high BMI and consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages to increase the predicted chronological age by 2–6 years, while consumption of fatty fish, drinking moderate amounts of coffee and exercising reduced the predicted age by approximately the same amount.
Blood Plasma
By examining the blood plasma and its protein, the team of researchers is presented with a staggering amount of information.
Here we demonstrate by analysis of 77 plasma proteins in 976 individuals, that the abundance of circulating proteins accurately predicts chronological age, as well as anthropometrical measurements such as weight, height and hip circumference.
The analysis of the blood proteins made it possible to predict chronological age within 5.0 years, weight within 6.8 kg, height within 4.7 cm and hip circumference within 5.1 cm, for 50% of the observations.
Future Crime Scene Investigations
The research could help medical treatment and patient follow-up, as doctors who have prescribed a certain diet and excessive, would be able to assess progress in patient health.
But there is one area of particular interesting. The findings could greatly benefit police work during crime scene investigations and offender profiling.
The “phantom” profile of the offender could be much more accurate. As the police would be able to assess appearance and age of the offender. Any blood test would reveal the sex, length, age and other dimensions of the person. It would be possible to match a witness description of the offender, to what the blood test reveal.
A DNA test reveals a lot of about a person, but it doesn’t reveal the height and weight of a person.
The study, published in the open access journal Scientific Reports, they have analyzed a number of proteins in blood samples from 1,000 people.
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Protein profiling reveals consequences of lifestyle choices on predicted biological aging
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