Biomarkers Used to Track Benefits of Anti-Ageing Therapies Can be Misleading
hubie writes:
Biomarkers used to track benefits of anti-ageing therapies can be misleading:
We all grow old and die, but we still don't know why. Diet, exercise and stress all effect our lifespan, but the underlying processes that drive ageing remain a mystery. Often, we measure age by counting our years since birth and yet our cells know nothing of chronological time-our organs and tissues may age more rapidly or slowly regardless of what we'd expect from counting the number of orbits we tale around the sun.
For this reason, many scientists search to develop methods to measure the "biological age" of our cells -- which can be different from our chronological age. In theory, such biomarkers of ageing could provide a measure of health that could revolutionize how we practice medicine. Individuals could use a biomarker of ageing to track their biological age over time and measure the effect of diet, exercise, and drugs and predict their effects to extend lifespan or improve quality of life. Medicines could be designed and identified based on their effect on biological age. In other words, we could start to treat ageing itself.
However, no accurate and highly predictive test for biological age has been validated to date. In part, this is because we still don't know what causes ageing and so can't measure it. Definitive progress in the field will require validating biomarkers throughout a patient's lifetime, an impractical feat given human life expectancy.
[...] Describing their results in the journal PLOS Computational Biology, the research team found that nematodes have at least two partially independent ageing processes taking place at the same time - one that determines VMC [vigorous movement cessation] and the other determines time of death. While both processes follow different trajectories, their rates are correlated to each other, in other words, in individuals for whom VMC occurred at an accelerated rate, so did time of death, and vice versa. In other words, the study revealed that each individual nematode has at least two distinct biological ages.
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