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When Dr. Aditi Gurkar was growing up in India, she witnessed her grandparents grow older, as many children do. 

But she noticed her grandmother’s physical and mental conditions spiraled downward in the last 10 years of her life, whereas her grandfather was fit until the end of his life.

“They aged very differently” even though they were the same age, she says.

It’s an observation that ultimately led to her career path as an assistant professor of geriatric medicine at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Medicine and a member of the Aging Institute, a joint venture of Pitt and UPMC — and to a recent discovery. 

Gurkar is part of a team that found a blood-based marker that could help to predict why some people age well and others don’t. There’s a difference between a person’s chronological age, the number of trips they’ve taken around the sun, and their biological age, how they function cognitively and physically.

“We take one blood test and we can tell who’s a healthy ager versus a rapid ager, and we think this could be really promising, because if we can start doing these tests early on, hopefully, like when a person is in their 30s and 40s, maybe we can tell who is going to look like a healthy ager and be really functional until the end of life and who is going to be a rapid ager,” she says. 

It’s a discovery that can also help to determine what sorts of preventions a person should take based on their own body rather than making a requirement for various health screenings at an arbitrary age, which is how our healthcare system currently functions, Gurkar says. 

She gave the example of a healthy 50-year-old who is being told they need a mammogram simply because they’re 50, but perhaps a 20-year-old with risk factors is told they don’t need a mammogram simply because they’re 20. 

“We’re missing a lot of these people by not re-looking at our policies of when to do these things,” she says. 

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Gurkar’s lab has been studying a person’s metabolism — their environment, genetic factors, what someone eats and their level of physical activity — and a person’s senescent cells, sometimes referred to as “zombie cells.” Senescent cells accumulate as a person ages and are resistant to dying but can cause inflammation, a factor in several age-related diseases.

Gurkar gave the example of someone in their 30s discovering they have a large amount of senescent cells and discovering there’s a medicine they can take to eliminate them. 

“Then maybe I can take that when I’m 30 instead of having this low-grade inflammation that is then going to cause all of these diseases,” Gurkar says. 

This research is going to be very important with our aging population, Gurkar says. 

“We’re going to have an elderly population, and if they’re not in functional health we’ll have to provide a lot of resources, not only financially, but also we’ll have to make sure our young are able to take care of our older population,” she says. “I think this is a big challenge, and if we don’t start talking about it today it’s only going to grow bigger.”