Abstract
There is enormous diversity in health span with age, ranging from unhealthy 60- to vital 90-year-olds. This diversity is poorly understood and obscures the effect of interventions (rarely tested in elderly subjects). Underlying this diversity may be energy metabolism and immunity – understood as drivers of health in ageing. Biomarkers based on this knowledge could improve evidence-based medicine among the elderly, but will require coordinated efforts in longitudinal and intervention studies. Ageing-related changes in omics may have greater predictive power than traditional metrics of metabolic health (e.g. metabolites, glycosylations, transcripts, epigenetics and gut microbiome versus serum insulin, lipids, BP and BMI), especially in the fastest growing population of elderly humans. In our ongoing research on omics as biomarker in ageing, we witness signatures of early development in addition to age-related dys-differentiation, revealing both generic and disease-specific signatures. We will discuss the insights obtained from linking intervention and epidemiological studies.