It should be able to predict the outcomes of healthy or unhealthy aging. Quantitative biomarkers of aging should be able to define a group of measurements for ‘healthy aging’. They also would have been studied across a variety of demographics, over an extended period of time. If the biomarker you are using to assess a biological function leaves space for doubt, it is probably not a good diagnostic tool.Ī good biomarker for aging would differentiate people who are of the same chronological age, yet have different rates of biological aging. Accurate – Accuracy refers to how close a measurement is to the ‘true’ or accepted value.Ī reliable biomarker, once extensively studied and replicated, leaves little room for error.Precise – When measuring the same item over and over, the measurements will be very similar.Quantifiable – translates to specific data, not vague ideas.Able to provide clinically relevant information.All of these biomarkers have been used to determine biological age, yet none of them qualify as good biomarkers. After decades of research, a few notable biomarkers have been found, including telomere length, transcriptome profiles, protein and lipid metabolism, to name a few. Since the 1980’s, it has been recognized that valid and reliable biomarkers of aging are needed to achieve the longstanding goal of understanding, slowing, and reversing the process of aging. To track biological aging, which happens in every cell across your body, you need some sort of marker that is present across the entire body, which can provide clinically useful information about the progression of the hallmarks of aging. These are two biomarkers which can indicate heart health. For example, your doctor may track blood pressure and cholesterol levels. A biomarker can indicate normal or abnormal processes. Typically, a biomarker is found in blood or other tissue. They manifest in little tweaks to how well a cell can fight off the development of tumors, or how well it can regulate its own nutrient uptake.įinding a reliable way to measure and track how your lifestyle affects aging has become the next great enterprise in integrative and preventive medicine.Ī biomarker is a diagnostic tool that uses a change in the body to indicate something else, like general health or disease progression. Epigenetic alterations can become outwardly visible, but they are often subtle changes throughout organs and tissues. These changes are called epigenetic alterations, which have a cascading effect on many other hallmarks of aging. Things like extreme stress, excessive alcohol consumption or smoking, chronic dehydration, and radiation can actually change how our genes are expressed. However, there are also changes that are made to aging that happen in response to what you’ve lived through. The more years you’ve been alive, the more it’s likely that your cells have goofed a couple hundred times, and that’s starting to build up. There’s a lot of chances to make a mistake, each year you’re alive. You get millions of new cells, each with an incredibly complex system that needs to be perfectly replicated each time. After all, your body folds trillions of proteins throughout your life. Biological age looks at how the systems in your body are holding up after all this time.Īs time passes, there are more chances for errors to occur in things like epigenetic management of genes, or protein misfolds. Chronological age is tracked by your birthday – it’s simply how many years you’ve lived on this earth. Being 30 years old isn’t a guarantee that your stem cells are vigorously healthy – chronological age and biological age (the Hallmarks of Aging) are only loosely tied together. After all, there are 70-year-olds who run marathons, and 25-year-olds with greying hair and chronic mitochondrial dysfunctions that make it hard to get out of bed. How old you are doesn’t necessarily correlate to how your body is aging at a cellular level. People have long been fascinated by the fact that some people seem to age rapidly in terms of health and appearance, while others age more slowly. Quick overview of what you’ll learn from this blog post:
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