2023-10-13 19:26:01
“You look younger than your age.” The compliment reserved for people with an enviable appearance who seem to have stopped time, despite the date of birth shown on their identity card, tells a truth: biological aging does not always coincide with chronological aging. And a new test could reveal how old our body really is. It was developed by a team of researchers from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and the University of Glagow in the United Kingdom. It’s technically called the ‘epigenetic clock’, a type of biochemical assessment that examines DNA to understand how well a person’s body is aging compared to the age recorded in the registry office.
The one developed by the international team of experts is the first of these cutting-edge tests to have been shown to work accurately in a clinical context, in both healthy and diseased tissue. In other words, it accurately measures body aging. The results are published in the ‘Journal of Internal Medicine’, as part of a study on the effects in this sense of chronic kidney disease, and associated therapies. “Our data, obtained using the new ‘Glasgow-Karolinska clock’, show not only that these patients age faster than the general population, but their accelerated aging only slows down after undergoing a transplant. Treatment with dialysis does not appear to have no impact on this process,” explains Peter Stevinke, professor at the Swedish institute.
The team studied more than 400 patients with chronic kidney disease in Sweden along with around 100 matched population controls, to better understand the disease’s impact on aging. To do this, the researchers used a variety of tests, including blood biomarkers, skin autofluorescence and epigenetic clocks. The team used the clocks to measure the change in the patients’ biological age one year after the different treatments, but also studied how the healthy tissue of people in the control group aged.
Hence the demonstration that the biological clock of the patients examined runs faster than that of an average healthy person. But there were precision issues, and the team developed a new, more accurate epigenetic clock – the Glasgow-Karolinska clock, in fact – that works equally well on both healthy and diseased tissue.
As the body ages, a number of factors lead to epigenetic changes and the loss of a ‘chemical tag’ (DNA methylation) from the genetic code. This phenomenon is often associated with a number of diseases common with aging, such as chronic kidney disease, cancer, and heart disease. Epigenetic clocks have been proposed as the ‘gold standard’, as they are able to measure these aspects.
The one developed by the experts was shown to do so more accurately, even “compared to the high standards of a clinical setting,” says Helen Erlandsson (Karolinska Institutet), one of the study’s first authors. “The ‘tagging’ of DNA methylation is influenced by what we eat and also by the gut microbiome. As a result – he highlights – this new clock has real potential to be able to evaluate lifestyle interventions, including diet, which could benefit the public and help address issues such as health inequalities.”
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