Most older adults do not have one disease; they accumulate several, and the pace of that accumulation shapes everything from independence to survival. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet's Aging Research Center report in Nature Medicine that a handful of routine blood biomarkers can predict which older adults will develop multimorbidity and how quickly, opening the way to risk stratification long before diseases cluster.
The team measured 54 biomarkers reflecting inflammation, vascular health, metabolism and neurodegeneration in more than 2,200 people aged 60 and over from the general Stockholm population, relating them to disease counts, five common disease patterns and the speed of disease accumulation over 15 years. Findings were validated in an independent United States cohort of 522 participants. Seven biomarkers carried the signal: GDF-15, HbA1c, cystatin C, leptin and insulin were consistently associated with all multimorbidity measures, while gamma-glutamyl transferase and albumin specifically tracked the speed of progression.
The study, Shared and specific blood biomarkers for multimorbidity, was led by first author Alice Margherita Ornago and principal investigator Davide Liborio Vetrano, with collaborators at KTH, SciLifeLab, the Universities of Brescia and Milano-Bicocca and the US National Institute on Aging, funded by the Swedish Research Council, Karolinska strategic research areas and the US National Institutes of Health.