Similar to doing an MOT on a car, scientists believe they can run a blood test to check how fast a person’s internal organs are aging, and even predict which ones might soon fail.
The Stanford University team says they can monitor 11 major body parts, including the heart, brain and lungs.
They tried it on thousands of adults, mostly middle-aged or older.
One in five reasonably healthy adults aged 50-plus might have at least one fast-ageing organ, the results suggest.
And one to two in every 100 might have several organs that test older than their birthday years.
While the idea of the check-up might be scary, it could be an opportunity to intervene and change course, the researchers say.
Knowing which organs are in rapid decline could help reveal what health issues may be looming, the researchers say in the journal Nature.
Dr Wyss-Coray said: “If we can reproduce this finding in 50,000 or 100,000 individuals it will mean that by monitoring the health of individual organs in apparently healthy people, we might be able to find organs that are undergoing accelerated ageing in people’s bodies, and we might be able to treat people before they get sick.”
Prof Paul Sheils, an expert in the biology of ageing at Glasgow University, said it was still important to look at the whole body, not just individual organs, to build the most accurate picture of a person’s health.
Caroline Abrahams from the charity Age UK said it while it was great that science was exploring earlier detection of serious age-related diseases, consideration was needed about how people might feel living with the knowledge.
Should it become a reality, she said people would want emotional and clinical support alongside the test results and that the NHS would need to be ready for that – and have the funding to provide it.
