2024-08-23 11:55:04
How old are you really? Date of birth is the number of years a person has lived. Biological age is the age of your cells, which scientists say can help better assess age-related health and disease risk. People age biologically at different rates, depending on genetics and environmental factors, so a person’s chronological age does not necessarily correspond to their biological age.
In recent years, direct-to-consumer physical age tests have become more accessible and popular as interest in this early science has increased. But do they really work?
Many of these tests work by looking at specific changes in the DNA in the patient’s blood or saliva. These changes become more frequent as cells age, a phenomenon known as “the epigenetic clock».
However, it is important to note that it is currently unknown whether epigenetic clock signals are the same in approximately 200 different cell types in the human body.
A study carried out by Konrad Hochedlinger, Rebecca Gorelov, of the Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital (USA), published in ‘Attend Cell Report‘, aims to shed light on this issue, asking how the presence of stem cells in a tissue or organ affects its epigenetic clock.
By measuring DNA mutations in each individual cell, rather than in all cells combined, it became clear that cells from muscle, blood and bone marrow had a lower epigenetic age than cells that grow more.
However, A relatively young epigenetic age is not a universal practice of stem cellssince cells from other organs, such as the skin and intestine, have the same epigenetic age as the cells that grow older. Later experiments showed that the epigenetic age of a stem cell is related to the speed at which it divides and produces new cells to regenerate and renew its original body. This speed is comparatively higher in the skin and intestine than in muscle or blood.
This study shows that the epigenetic age of the tissue as a whole is affected by the frequency and activity of its cells, which are subject to changes in response to aging, injury or disease.
These findings have important implications for the interpretation of business age tests and will help to improve their reliability and validity in the future.
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