Iron and ageing - what a study of 1 million people revealed

Scientists from the the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing and the University of Edinburgh have studied the link between blood iron levels and three measures linked to biological ageing, namely lifespan, years of life lived free of disease (healthspan), and being extremely long–lived (longevity).

The researchers pooled information from three public datasets to enable an analysis in unprecedented detail. The combined dataset was equivalent to studying 1.75 million lifespans or more than 60,000 extremely long-lived people.

One of the authors said “We are very excited by these findings as they strongly suggest that high levels of iron in the blood reduces our healthy years of life, and keeping these levels in check could prevent age-related damage. We speculate that our findings on iron metabolism might also start to explain why very high levels of iron-rich red meat in the diet has been linked to age-related conditions such as heart disease.”