Scientists have found that the age of cells in the human body fluctuates throughout the day.
This information was reported by ScienceAlert, reports URA-Inform.
According to the results of the study, it turned out that in the morning a person is young, and in the evening he becomes much older.
Scientists have explained that most of our body cells have a genetic code that tells our body how to make the proteins it needs to survive. Over time and experience, small modifications are added that act like genetic switches, affecting how our cells interpret these instructions. The accumulation of these changes is often used to estimate the biological age of our cells and tissues.
Thus, researchers from Lithuania showed that edits can fluctuate even throughout the day. The team examined several blood samples from a 52-year-old man, which were taken every three hours for 72 hours. What the scientists found surprised them. As it turned out, the man was younger in the morning, and in the afternoon his biological clock showed that his body had aged – by about 5.5 years. This daily cycle is similar to what other scientists found in a 2020 study.
Most aging studies use whole blood as tissue. However, experiments in the laboratory have shown that the number of white blood cell subtypes and their proportions fluctuate on a 24-hour basis. This means that one aging test at one time of day may not provide the full picture.
By relying on samples from just one person, the team could focus on one set of changes. However, further analysis of different blood samples taken over five hours from a small group also revealed age-related variations. The fact is that our blood contains different types of leukocytes at different times of the day. But some measurements did show this age-related fluctuation, even though the researchers focused on just one type of white blood cell.
The findings suggest that to get an accurate picture of the age of our cells, scientists in the future may need to take multiple samples at different times days. A more complete measurement of the age range could also allow more accurate predictions about the risk of age-related diseases.
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