Proteomic architecture of frailty across the spectrum of cardiovascular disease

Abstract

AbstractWhile frailty is a prominent risk factor in an aging population, the underlying biology of frailty is incompletely described. Here, we integrate 979 circulating proteins across a wide range of physiologies with 12 measures of frailty in a prospective discovery cohort of 809 individuals with severe aortic stenosis (AS) undergoing transcatheter aortic valve implantation. Our aim was to characterize the proteomic architecture of frailty in a highly susceptible population and study its relation to clinical outcome and systems‐wide phenotypes to define potential novel, clinically relevant frailty biology. Proteomic signatures (specifically of physical function) were related to post‐intervention outcome in AS, specifying pathways of innate immunity, cell growth/senescence, fibrosis/metabolism, and a host of proteins not widely described in human aging. In published cohorts, the “frailty proteome” displayed heterogeneous trajectories across age (20–100 years, age only explaining a small fraction of variance) and were associated with cardiac and non‐cardiac phenotypes and outcomes across two broad validation cohorts (N > 35,000) over ≈2–3 decades. These findings suggest the importance of precision biomarkers of underlying multi‐organ health status in age‐related morbidity and frailty.