M. Austin Argentieri

3 weeks ago | nature.com | Chiara Herzog |Kejun Ying |Raghav Sehgal |Waylon J. Hastings |Alexander Tyshkovskiy |Sara Hägg | +19 more

On 1–2 November 2024, the annual Biomarkers of Aging conference welcomed academic and industry scientists, and partners from governmental and nongovernmental organizations, to Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA, to discuss new insights into measuring and monitoring human aging, with the aim of clinical translation. In this Meeting Report, we summarize the conference and offer potential future directions for the Biomarkers of Aging Consortium and the longevity science community at large.

2 months ago | nature.com | M. Austin Argentieri |Najaf Amin |Alejo J Nevado-Holgado |William Sproviero |Jennifer Collister |Sarai Keestra | +7 more

Both environmental exposures and genetics are known to play important roles in shaping human aging. Here we aimed to quantify the relative contributions of environment (referred to as the exposome) and genetics to aging and premature mortality. To systematically identify environmental exposures associated with aging in the UK Biobank, we first conducted an exposome-wide analysis of all-cause mortality (n = 492,567) and then assessed the associations of these exposures with a proteomic age clock (n = 45,441), identifying 25 independent exposures associated with mortality and proteomic aging. These exposures were also associated with incident age-related multimorbidity, aging biomarkers and major disease risk factors. Compared with information on age and sex, polygenic risk scores for 22 major diseases explained less than 2 percentage points of additional mortality variation, whereas the exposome explained an additional 17 percentage points. Polygenic risk explained a greater proportion of variation (10.3–26.2%) compared with the exposome for incidence of dementias and breast, prostate and colorectal cancers, whereas the exposome explained a greater proportion of variation (5.5–49.4%) compared with polygenic risk for incidence of diseases of the lung, heart and liver. Our findings provide a comprehensive map of the contributions of environment and genetics to mortality and incidence of common age-related diseases, suggesting that the exposome shapes distinct patterns of disease and mortality risk, irrespective of polygenic disease risk. Based on a systematic analysis of environmental exposures associated with aging and mortality in the UK Biobank, the relative contributions of such exposures and genetic risk for mortality and a range of age-related diseases were compared, highlighting the potential beneficial effects of environment-focused interventions.

Aug 8, 2024 | nature.com | M. Austin Argentieri |Derrick Bennett |Ashwag Albukhari |Jun Lv |Iona Y. Millwood |Hannah Fry | +6 more

AbstractCirculating plasma proteins play key roles in human health and can potentially be used to measure biological age, allowing risk prediction for age-related diseases, multimorbidity and mortality. Here we developed a proteomic age clock in the UK Biobank (n = 45,441) using a proteomic platform comprising 2,897 plasma proteins and explored its utility to predict major disease morbidity and mortality in diverse populations.