Another, which my lab has worked on, is epigenetic clocks. Molecular-level methods include the measurement of telomere length, though I don’t think it is such a powerful predictor. Counting the diseases and/or high-risk conditions a person has and adding this up into a single score is one method, though it is much less predictive for younger people. I have published a method of estimating biological age that combines nine blood measures and the calculator to do it is free online.īut there are other ways too. Right now, probably the cheapest and easiest way is based on regular clinical lab tests that people would get done as part of an annual physical. There are various consumer tests available. Doing it regularly gives a more accurate picture: people can put too much weight on a single measurement and things like being sick or uncharacteristically stressed can misconstrue it. Both my and others’ labs have shown these measures are better than just the standard cholesterol or glucose level tests that physicians currently use. But they are good enough to give people a general sense of their health status. There is no standard, agreed upon way yet for measuring biological age – different methods give different numbers – and there’s probably no “perfect” way either, because there is nothing to compare against. It is early days for these tests, and they still need improvement. Is the science really advanced enough for that? You advocate getting our biological age measured regularly – once or twice a year. The process – biological ageing – that gives rise to cancer also causes diabetes, Alzheimer’s, heart disease and others The first step is getting a valid and reliable measure of it, which my lab has been working on. We don’t yet know exactly how to modify it to the greatest extent, but the clock can be made to tick slower, or even possibly go backwards, in response to our behaviours (though it can also speed up). The wonderful thing, compared with chronological age, is that biological age is modifiable. Most people’s biological age will be within plus or minus five years of their chronological age, but you can have outliers of up to 10 or more years. That’s because it is not chronological time that drives the development of disease, but rather the biological changes taking place among the molecules and cells in our bodies. It is more informative than chronological age for predicting risk of disease or death. I saw the resources it takes to care for older adults and wondered if there was a possibility to delay that need. My mother, who works on ageing policy, also influenced me. Most kids aren’t pondering their parents’ mortality early on, but I was already consumed with the fear that he might not be around. He was 54 when I was born and people always assumed he was my grandfather. What got you interested in the science of biological ageing? This June she will join Altos Labs, a new $3bn (£2.2bn) anti-ageing biotech startup whose funders are said to include Jeff Bezos. Levine, 37, is an assistant professor of pathology and epidemiology at Yale University’s school of medicine. In her new book, True Age, she argues that we should regularly measure our own biological age – giving us information we could use to monitor, and even gain control over, our own individual ageing process. Dr Morgan Levine designs tools that measure the latter. I t can be said we have two ages: a fixed chronological age based on when we were born and a malleable biological age – the age at which our body is functioning, which can be affected by our lifestyle choices.
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