Researchers developed the Liver Aging Index (LAI), a noninvasive biomarker score combining clinical factors, plasma markers, and imaging data that predicts all-cause mortality and liver-related events more accurately than chronological age across three large cohorts. Liver aging acceleration—the gap between biological and chronological age—carries substantial risk elevation, with genetic analysis revealing amyloid-beta clearance dysfunction as a mechanistic driver of accelerated liver aging.
Key Points
- LAI outperforms chronological age for mortality prediction across populations
- Each standard deviation increase in liver aging acceleration raises mortality risk 22–85%
- Amyloid-beta clearance dysfunction implicated in accelerated liver aging
Longevity Analysis
This work establishes a practical, generalizable framework for detecting when the liver—a central detoxification and metabolic organ—is aging faster than the organism as a whole. The predictive power of LAI suggests that biological aging is neither uniform nor fixed; measuring organ-specific aging acceleration could shift clinical practice from chronological age toward functional biological status. The genetic and proteomic findings linking amyloid-beta clearance to liver aging point to a previously underrecognized connection between protein clearance capacity and organ resilience, opening a mechanistic pathway for intervention that extends beyond conventional liver disease screening.
Original published by Wiley Aging Cell, by Zhiyu Wu, Shanshan Wu, Shuyao Song, Yating Huang, Canqing Yu, Dianjianyi Sun, Pei Pei, Ling Yang, Yiping Chen, Huaidong Du, Robin Walters, Iona Millwood, Hao Xu, Xiaoming Yang, Junshi Chen, Seung Up Kim, Salvatore Petta, Atsushi Nakajima, Emmanuel Tsochatzis, Jérôme Boursier, Elisabetta Bugianesi, Wah‐Kheong Chan, Manuel Romero‐Gomez, José Luis Calleja, Victor de Lédinghen, Laurent Castéra, Arun J. Sanyal, George Boon‐Bee Goh, Philip Noel Newsome, Jian‐Gao Fan, Michelle Lai, Xiao‐Dong Zhou, Zhengming Chen, Jun Lv, Liming Li, Vincent Wai‐Sun Wong, Ming‐Hua Zheng, Yuanjie Pang, on behalf of the China Kadoorie Biobank Collaborative Group and VCTE‐Prognosis Study Group.