Your heart might be older than you are

Your heart might be older than you are

We can now measure organ ages. We’re just not sure we can do anything about it.

NextLevel is our series on a simple bet: healthcare is shifting from occasional checkups to constant, real-time tracking, powered by new sensors and machine learning. This episode, we talked to Dr. Tony Wyss-Coray, a Stanford neurologist whose early work found that blood from young mice could rejuvenate old mouse brains, a discovery that reshaped how his field thinks about aging. That insight led him to build a way to estimate the biological age of each of your organs, and now, of more than 40 individual cell types, from a single blood draw. He's also candid about where the science still stops short.

Explore organ aging →

Five Key Takeaways

1. Aging doesn't move at a steady pace.

When Wyss-Coray's team tracked protein shifts across the lifespan, they found bursts of change clustered around ages 30 to 40, 60 to 65, and 80, not a straight line. A Stanford geneticist found similar turning points using entirely different data, part of why he takes the pattern seriously.

2. This blood panel can flag disease years before it shows up.