“Let’s say a medical doctor orders an epigenetic clock test, and it indicates a patient is older than they should be, what should the doctor say? There’s no cure they can prescribe,” beyond repeating conventional health advice. “Currently these clocks are not useful for the average person because we don’t have an intervention to slow ageing,” he said. Horvath has mixed feelings about the tests’ popularity. But in most states, you can order a biological age test online as long as you’re over 18 and have a credit card. I tried to buy a biological age test from Thorne, but found out that I wasn’t allowed to order one due to laws in New York, which is among a handful of US states that restrict or prohibit “direct access” medical tests. None of these tests have been approved by the FDA. There are popular but less expensive options that don’t use epigenetic clocks, such as Thorne’s biological age test, which costs $99 and requires a trip to a third-party lab to give a blood sample. “Breakthroughs in ageing research are no longer a myth of science fiction but scientific fact,” the company’s website boasts.Ī company called MyDNAge, which claims to offer the “most accurate and reliable DNA Age test”, charges $299 for a blood or urine test that uses a licensed version of Horvath’s clock. They range in price and testing format: Elysium’s $499 saliva test is based on a biological clock developed by Horvath’s former postdoc, Dr Morgan Levine. These biological age tests are marketed as premium wellness products, often with sleek websites, minimalist packaging and influencer endorsements on social media.Įlysium Health’s Index test. In recent years, these methods have led to an explosion in startups that aim to measure biological age for consumers. If that all sounds complex, it’s perhaps crystalized by the name Horvath gave his second-generation clock: GrimAge, as in the Grim Reaper. That data helps the clocks to identify unhealthy ageing with greater precision – and, Horvath suggests, “predict time to death”. Since then, Horvath and other scientists have developed more accurate clocks, based on data collected from the blood samples of the same group of people over many decades. The result was a formula able to estimate age across a human’s entire life course, from fetus to old age. Horvath’s clock tracks several hundreds of these locations. It’s really millions of locations of DNA,” he said. “As we age, certain parts of the DNA gain methylation and other parts lose methylation. Horvath compared methylation to sand moving through an hourglass. In 2011, Horvath found patterns of DNA methylation could be used to accurately estimate human age. Horvath’s clock analyzes certain chemical changes to genetic material, a process called DNA methylation. Epigenetics is the study of how your environment changes the way your genes work. Horvath’s approach, called the “ epigenetic clock”, is considered by many scientists to be the gold standard. Some approaches even claim to determine mortality risk by scanning people’s eyes. Other approaches take blood samples and measure the presence of molecules that correlate with decreased bodily function. One approach focuses on the length of telomeres, which are protective structures on the ends of our chromosomes, that shorten every time a chromosome replicates – making them an approximate yardstick for biological ageing. “Researchers debate how to define it,” said Horvath. But the first step is to try to measure it, and that’s not straightforward. The hope is that understanding biological age can lead to new life-lengthening interventions. It is in some ways a tautology: if it wasn’t better, we wouldn’t call it biological age.” “Knowing how fast she is really ageing, it gives her a renewed sense of self and how she should live in the upcoming decade.”ĭr Steve Horvath, a 54-year-old UCLA professor who pioneered the first “clock” to indicate human ageing by examining chemical changes to DNA, told me that “biological age is a better predictor of morbidity risk than chronological age. “It was such a relief for her, because it gives her a newfound hope about life planning,” Chan said. “She looks like a 40-year-old!” he said.Ībout two months later, they got the results back: Ivy’s biological age was 43. But with her youthful looks, she still felt healthy. “She always talked about entering her 60s and how it’s a big step, and this is the start of fading away,” Chan told me. Chan felt his mother, Ivy, who is 59 years old, would benefit from knowing her biological age because she was anxious about getting older.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |