Obesity Can Drastically Age The Liver

Obesity can cause a host of health issues, ranging from cardiovascular problems to type 2 diabetes and more. Now, recent findings published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) also reveal that it can drastically age your liver.

"This is the first study that evaluated the effect of body weight on the biological ages of a variety of human tissues," study first author Steve Horvath, a professor of human genetics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) and a professor of biostatistics at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, said. "Given the obesity epidemic in the Western world, the results of this study are highly relevant for public health."

Researchers from UCLA and the University Hospital Dresden in Germany worked to examine the effects of excess weight on the body's tissues. They analyzed roughly 1,200 human tissue samples with 140 of them being liver samples. Then they measured the biological age of the select tissues.

Findings revealed that the tissues' biological age to the chronological age of the subjects both matched, but the liver of obese patients were older. Furthermore, for every 10-unit increase in body mass index (BMI), the liver's epigenetic age increased by 3.3 years.

"This does not sound like a lot, but it is actually a very strong effect," Horvath concluded. "For some people, the age acceleration due to obesity will be much more severe, even up to 10 years older."