Scientists are searching for the secrets of aging
Some people seem to age faster than others. Twenty-five years after leaving school, one classmate may seem ten years younger than the others, another ten years older. Scientists have been able to more accurately determine biological age. New tests promise to show whether a participant in an experiment has the cells of a 30-year-old or a 60-year-old person.
Scientists are working to determine a person's exact biological age by assessing the state of their cells, rather than how many years they have lived. Some of these measurements are now sold as blood tests available directly to the consumer. Experts warn that while these tests are interesting in theory and could be valuable research tools, they are not ready for public release.
“People know this intuitively,” said Nir, director of the Institute for Aging Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Barzilai – but they don't understand that this is biology that we are trying to discover.”
Researchers define biological age as the accumulation of damage that we can measure in our bodies. This is explained by Andrea Britta Mayer, co-director of the Center for Healthy Longevity at the National University of Singapore: “This damage occurs as a result of natural aging, as well as our environment and behavior.”
The first mention of what human biological age is is attributed to the British physician-scientist Dr. Alex Comfort, who published an article about this idea in 1969. But for decades, scientists didn't know how they could measure someone's biological age.
Significant progress was made in 2013, when Steve Horvath, a professor of human genetics and biostatistics at UCLA, proposed using “clocks” that accumulate molecular changes in DNA throughout our lives. The researcher analyzed these changes in thousands of people and developed an algorithm to determine how they correlate with age.
Several US companies now sell tests for around $300 that use the technology to calculate your biological age by analyzing your blood or saliva and comparing it to the population average.
But experts warn that the epigenetic clock doesn't actually tell us much about health. This is because they were designed to evaluate large groups of people rather than individuals. Another problem with tests is that it is unclear what to do with the results. Scientists don't know how to change a person's biological age—or if it's even possible.
This is partly why epigenetic clocks were developed in the first place. The researchers hope to use them in clinical trials for anti-aging interventions to measure potential changes in the lifespan of hundreds or thousands of people at a time.
Epigenetic clocks are not the only products on the market that promise to measure biological age. Some companies offer a battery of routine blood tests that you can get at your doctor's office, such as cholesterol or hemoglobin levels, a marker for diabetes. For example, if you are 45 years old but your cholesterol levels are more in line with the average 50-year-old, the test results may indicate that your biological age is over 45.
It remains unknown whether the marker tests are valid blood tests track biological age, not general health. But the advantage of these types of tests is that they measure factors that can be changed. And epigenetic age by the clock is currently more of a black box.
“Expanding access and using more frequent testing to optimize health seems pretty reasonable to me,” says Poganik, a Harvard Medical School professor who studies natural aging. . But, he added, “any claims about precise determination of biological age at the individual level should be approached with caution.”
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