It’s no secret that a lucky few seem to glide into old age, the years settling gracefully on their bodies, while others appear to have been dragged through time tied to a metaphorical garbage truck. Biologists have been developing numerous ways to measure the rate an individual ages — often called an accelerated or decelerated “biological age” — and trying to translate it into a heightened or reduced risk of the morbidity and mortality that comes with aging.
There’s been a proliferation of various biological aging clocks, mathematical models that look at things like genetic markers or proteins in your body to make some estimation of an individual’s biological age. Research interest in using these clocks has exploded. In the last five years, thousands of papers on or incorporating the clocks have been published. The paper describing one popular biological aging clock, PhenoAge, has over 1,800 citations alone. One recent study suggested that a reason cancer incidence is increasing among younger adults may be accelerated aging, based on this particular clock.
But as scientists use these clocks to associate biological age with specific health risks, like cancer or dementia, and numerous companies eagerly offer biological age measurements in exchange for hundreds of bucks, it may be worth noting that experts don’t agree on what “biological age” actually is.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Angus Chen
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, https://www.statnews.com and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.