Mortality is associated with inflammation, anemia, specific diseases and treatments, and molecular markers

Abstract

Lifespan is a complex trait, and longitudinal data for humans are naturally scarce. We report the results of Cox regression and Pearson correlation analyses using data of the Study of Health in Pomerania (SHIP), with mortality data of 1518 participants (113 of which died), over a time span of more than 10 years. We found that in the Cox regression model based on the Bayesian information criterion, apart from chronological age of the participant, six baseline variables were considerably associated with higher mortality rates: smoking, mean attachment loss (i.e. loss of tooth supporting tissue), fibrinogen concentration, albumin/creatinine ratio, treated gastritis, and medication during the last 7 days. Except for smoking, the causative contribution of these variables to mortality was deemed inconclusive. In turn, four variables were found to be associated with decreased mortality rates: treatment of benign prostatic hypertrophy, treatment of dyslipidemia, IGF-1 and being female. Here, being female was an undisputed causative variable, the causal role of IFG-1 was deemed inconclusive, and the treatment effects were deemed protective to the degree that treated subjects feature better survival than respective controls. Using Cox modeling based on the Akaike information criterion, diabetes, mean corpuscular hemoglobin concentration, red blood cell count and serum calcium were also associated with mortality. The latter two, together with albumin and fibrinogen, aligned with an”integrated albunemia” model of aging proposed recently.

Health and Aging: Unifying Concepts, Scores, Biomarkers and Pathways

“…The accumulation of DNA mutations, however, must be considered to be a biomarker of aging, even if the underlying processes were purely chronological, because they have deleterious consequences. In general, we can expect strong correlations between wellbeing, health and survival, but any causal links will be complex, see also [103] Is the feature easy to measure in practice? A feature should be easily measurable repeatedly, and the measurement should not influence health or survival by itself, and it should yield comparable results in human and other animal species [13]…”

“…The accumulation of DNA mutations, however, must be considered to be a biomarker of aging, even if the underlying processes were purely chronological, because they have deleterious consequences. In general, we can expect strong correlations between wellbeing, health and survival, but any causal links will be complex, see also [103]…”

Evaluating the relationship between lesion burden and aging among the skeletons of an 18th-19th century London cemetery using osteological and radiological analysis

“…An important aspect of studies about healthy aging involves the relationship between inflammation, aging, and mortality. Although studies have identified a link between inflammation and aging, the causative and correlative aspects of this link have been more difficult to determine [ 12 , 13 ]. What has been clearly identified, however, is that increases in inflammatory markers are associated with the presence of chronic diseases, such as arthritis, gout, and diabetes, as well as with the presence of acute disease [ 14 ].…”

“…Although most recent paleopathology studies focus on specific frailty indicators that have clear statistical relationships with age-at-death [ 21 ], our study takes a global approach, considering the relationship between age-at-death and the number of lesions observed in macro-level categories. Our justification for making this globalized comparison rests in correlations that have been demonstrated between inflammation, chronic disease, aging, and mortality [ 12 , 13 ]: we therefore took into account multiple potential sources of pathology in examining the relationship between lesion accumulation and age, including those that might not seem to have immediate bearing on cause of death (i.e., congenital factors). We had two goals in carrying out this study: first, to analyze the correlation between age-at-death and the number of lesions observed, using two different methods of analysis, and second, to characterize potential differences in lesion identification using osteological and radiological analysis.…”

An Emergent Integrated Aging Process Conserved Across Primates

“…Other potential emergent physiological processes related to aging include inflamm-aging (11,20) and metabolic syndrome (10,21). A separate subsequent study using a different human dataset and different methods independently recovered a set of biomarkers aligned with integrated albunemia as predictors of mortality (22). Thus, integrated albunemia seems promising as an emergent physiological process associated with aging and risk of mortality, but further studies are needed to establish its wider implications.…”