\n<\/p>\n
How old are you really? Counting birthdays may be a common tally, but your \u201cage\u201d isn\u2019t determined by time alone. New research increasingly shows the importance of considering chronological age as something very different from biological age\u2014in which the body and its cells, tissues and organs all have separate \u201cclocks\u201d that can tick at different speeds.<\/p>\n
\u201cCalculating biological age, I think, is core to the advances we\u2019ve made in the science of aging,\u201d says Eric Topol, a cardiologist and genomics professor at Scripps Research in California. \u201cIt\u2019s a way you can tell if a person, organ, or any biological unit is at pace of aging\u2014if it\u2019s normal, abnormal or supernormal.\u201d<\/p>\n
In his new book Super Agers: An Evidence-Based Approach to Longevity, Topol delves into the recent surge in public interest in biological aging and the accelerating quest to refine ways to measure it\u2014giving a more precise picture of a person\u2019s longevity prospects and of potential ailments that can be prevented or treated early. Scientific American spoke with Topol about the latest research in biological aging, factors that might speed it up or slow it down and what it can tell us about our health.<\/p>\n
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[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]<\/p>\n
How is biological age determined and how has the research evolved?<\/p>\n
The real beginning of this research started more than a decade ago by geneticist Steven Horvath with his \u201cclock\u201d [test], with which, basically using saliva, you could look at specific genetic markers in a genome and predict a person\u2019s biological age. His clock is really known as an epigenetic clock, or methylation clock. As people age, DNA changes and gets methylated\u2014this is when a methyl group [molecule] attaches to specific nucleotides of DNA. I kind of liken it to the body rusting out. Basically, you\u2019re getting marks at specific parts of the genome that track with aging in humans and every other species of mammal.<\/p>\n
In Horvath\u2019s initial test, there clearly was a detection of both alignment with the person\u2019s real age, or chronological age\u2014and when it wasn\u2019t matching up. In other words, if a person\u2019s biological age was off by a few years from their real age, you\u2019d wonder why that is.<\/p>\n
Then what\u2019s proliferated in the more than 10 years since has been all these other clocks: protein clocks, RNA clocks, immune system clocks\u2014you name it. Using plasma proteins from a blood sample, we can also clock organs\u2014whether it\u2019s the heart, brain, liver or kidney. So we have seen just enormous advances in these clocks, and they keep getting refined with added features. There\u2019s a race to get the best clocks to predict survival.<\/p>\n
What can biological age tests tell us clinically?<\/p>\n
We can detect in an individual if something\u2019s not right at different levels. For example, if your biological age is five years older than your real age, is there an organ that might be linked with that? Then you can use these clocks to see if lifestyle, prevention or treatment can slow down the pace of aging and get it into alignment with your actual age.<\/p>\n
The question is: When will doctors actually start using them? The medical community is very hard to change. So it hasn\u2019t happened yet, but I believe it will eventually. Tests are also made available by commercial companies, but they can be very expensive. You can run an epigenetic test in a very simple way for $10 or $20, while some of these companies are charging $200.<\/p>\n
I haven\u2019t seen their publications to be able to say with confidence that they are doing things right, and the lack of standards from one company to the next is disconcerting. They don\u2019t want to shock [customers by telling them] that they\u2019re 10 years older than their real chronological age. Eventually, I believe, we\u2019re going to have high-fidelity epigenetic clocks with no motivation for a provider to hold things back if a person\u2019s data are really bad.<\/p>\n
Why might someone biologically age \u201cfaster\u201d or \u201cslower\u201d than their actual age?<\/p>\n
If you had to pick one mechanism behind why biological age and chronological age are misaligned, it would most likely be because there are some genes that are either protective or linked with accelerated aging\u2014but that\u2019s such a small part of the story. Another root cause appears to be that our immune system gets weaker and less functional as we get older. In the average person, this starts around age 55 to 60. It drops its level of protection, or it gets dysregulated\u2014off track\u2014and it can have an untoward, hyperactive response. Now when you have that happen, you start to see inflammation in the organs, such as in the arteries of the heart or the brain\u2014it\u2019s what I call \u201cinflammaging.\u201d<\/p>\n
Obviously our lifestyle also has a big impact\u2014eating a really healthy diet that\u2019s not proinflammatory and doesn\u2019t have a lot of ultraprocessed foods or red meat. Good sleep health helps reduce inflammation. There\u2019s only one thing that\u2019s been definitively shown to slow the epigenetic aging process, and that\u2019s exercise. I think these clocks ultimately are going to be very good incentives for people to adopt a healthy lifestyle. We can\u2019t get everybody to do all these things that we know help them, but if they get their own data and they see something\u2019s off track, the hope is that they\u2019d [change their lifestyle]. That\u2019s, of course, just one of the ways to prevent diseases. There are also drugs and other treatments.<\/p>\n
What environmental factors are also important to consider?<\/p>\n
We have all kinds of food deserts in the U.S. We have air pollution and unmitigated accumulation in the air and water of microplastics and nanoplastics, which get into every part of our body and induce inflammation. And we have forever chemicals as well that are pervasive. These all play a factor in lifestyle, health and aging.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s talk more about \u201cinflammaging.\u201d We know some inflammation can be good for the body to fight infections, for instance, but a lot can be bad. How does chronic inflammation potentially accelerate aging?<\/p>\n
Inflammation and aging are so tightly intertwined. The immune system is really the driver for good [when it attacks pathogens] and for bad when it promotes too much inflammation in walls of arteries or the brain. That\u2019s heart disease and neurodegenerative disease, respectively. But what\u2019s so exciting is we can dial up or down the immune system now. For example, [there have been] natural, amazing experiments with the shingles vaccines, which reduce dementia and Alzheimer\u2019s disease 20 to 25 percent. So how does that work? Well, [the vaccine] amps up the immune system in people and older adults. That\u2019s going to be the critical thing in using these metrics: zooming in on the immune system and inflammation to keep people\u2019s immune system intact and stop it when it starts to go haywire. That\u2019s the future. In the last chapter of the book, I presented the first cut of my \u201cimmunome\u201d\u2014an assay of every virus and pathogen I\u2019ve been exposed to, every antibody I have. But that\u2019s just scratching the surface.<\/p>\n
The immune system clock could turn out to be the most useful of all; if I could pick one, that\u2019s the one I would want. But the immune system is very complex. Maybe we don\u2019t have to do a systematic, comprehensive assessment of our immunome [that would include checking antibody titers and] sequencing B cells, T cells and interferons. If we can use just a group of plasma proteins, that would be terrific. That remains to be seen. There\u2019s a human immunome project just getting started to try to compare things such as the proteins with the much more sophisticated and expensive ways to get at the health of an immune system.<\/p>\n
What are the downsides of slowing down biological aging, or extending lifespan?<\/p>\n
We feel really great if we get to age 85. \u201cSuper agers\u201d who don\u2019t get one of the big four age-related diseases [type 2 diabetes, cancer, or heart or neurodegenerative disease] say \u201cWell, I did it.\u201d Of course, if you get up to age 98, you\u2019re really doing well. I think we\u2019re going to have a whole lot more super agers. But that\u2019s not going to get around the fact that eventually they\u2019re going to develop some problems\u2014one of the big four or other conditions. It could be you get an infection because your immune system is just too weak. Or it could be you break your hip because your bone density is so low and you wind up with a pulmonary embolus [a clot that blocks blood flow to the lungs].<\/p>\n
Eventually you die, and you may have a chronic illness between that point of extended health span and when you die. I don\u2019t want to put a sense out there that super agers won\u2019t see problems in the latter stages of their lives. But the point is, let\u2019s extend the health span\u2014high-quality life without these big age-related diseases\u2014as much as we can before getting into the downturn of a health arc.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
How old are you really? Counting birthdays may be a common tally, but your \u201cage\u201d isn\u2019t determined by time alone. New research increasingly shows the importance of considering chronological age as something very different from biological age\u2014in which the body and its cells, tissues and organs all have separate \u201cclocks\u201d that can tick at different<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10893,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[2822,4052,4053,4055,4054,4056],"class_list":{"0":"post-10892","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-age","9":"tag-biological","10":"tag-clocks","11":"tag-eric","12":"tag-longevity","13":"tag-topol"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10892"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10892\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10893"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}