Want to slow pace of ageing? This age test promises to help

medium nocaption117480217Keeping up with the Kardashians has been quite a task, what with the first family of reality TV setting newer fashion, beauty and lifestyle trends almost every year. Who would have thought they would set health goals too? In July 2024, they took a biological age test during an episode of reality series ‘The Kardashians’ that yielded surprising results. Kim, 43, showed a biological age of 35, while 40-year-old sister Khloe had a cellular age of 28, much to Kim’s chagrin.But first, what is a biological age test? Well, it has nothing to do with the one on your birth certificate. In layman terms, it’s a test to find out how old the cells of your body are. Dr Andrea Britta Maier, co-director of the Centre for Healthy Longevity at the National University of Singapore, told The New York Times that biological age was “the accumulation of damage we can measure in our body”. That damage comes from natural ageing, as well as from our environment and behaviors.This is different from chronological age, which is the number of years we have lived on this earth.The concept is often attributed to the British physician-scientist Dr Alex Comfort (perhaps better known for writing “The Joy of Sex”), who published a 1969 paper on the idea. But for decades, scientists didn’t know how they might measure someone’s biological age.A major advance came in 2013 when Steve Horvath, a professor of human genetics and biostatistics at the University of California, Los Angeles, proposed using a “clock” based on the emerging field of epigenetics. Over the course of our lives, our DNA accumulates molecular changes that turn on and off various genes. Dr Horvath analysed these changes in thousands of people and developed an algorithm to determine how they correlate with age.These changes happen naturally as we get older, said Jesse Poganik, an instructor at Harvard Medical School who researches biological aging; they can also be sped up by behaviours that affect health, like smoking and excessive alcohol consumption. As a result, estimates of biological age have been shown to be associated with things like life expectancy and health, he said.The Kardashian family took the Horvath test – still thought of as the gold standard for determining biological age. The kit was produced by the company TruDiagnostic. medium nocaption117480112Optimising healthThere are other longevity-based companies offering biological age tests as well, though they come with hefty price tags. Using epigenetic markers, these tests measure the impact of lifestyle, environment and behaviour on ageing. This can help people adjust their diet, exercise, social interactions and sleep.Not just celebrities, these tests are finding favour with regular people keen to optimise their health as well. Indians like Rakesh Somani, co-founder of longevity research company Decode Age, also go for periodic biological age tests, calling them “the most sophisticated tools developed to understand the biological ageing process”.While the epigenetic age test is the most sophisticated and considered the most accurate, there are all kinds of biological age tests. Somani’s favourite is the peripheral blood marker test.“This is quite simple. It’s just my regular annual blood check of about 70 markers, which are then run through an algorithm to predict my biological age in reference to my chronological age. I find this extremely useful as it tells me which of my blood markers contribute to my accelerated ageing and is actionable to the T,” he says.Whether blood marker tests actually track biological age as opposed to general health, though, is up for debate. But an advantage of this kind of test is that it measures factors that can be modified; we know how to lower blood sugar levels through medication and lifestyle changes, for example. In contrast, epigenetic age is currently more of a black box. medium nocaption117480149There are also transcriptomic clocks (machine learning algorithms that use gene expression data to determine biological age) and lipid clocks, but Somani says these are yet to make it to the market. “But eventually, these are going to be everyday tools. We are working towards something like this using microbiome data, and there will be more based on biomarkers as well. Their fate and timeline in the market though will be decided by how robust, reliable and reproducible they are,” he adds.Be waryHowever, experts say epigenetic clocks have been designed to assess large groups of people, not individuals. So, the results might not be that reliable. Daniel Belsky, associate professor of epidemiology at Columbia University who developed an epigenetic clock himself, tells NYT, “I think you could say the best of them are not completely useless. But these are not tried and tested clinical tools yet, so they’re more for the curious.”And it’s all part of the craze to live longer and healthier. Longevity guru and former Silicon Valley executive Bryan Johnson, who is now the subject of a Netflix documentary, says he has reversed his biological age by 5.1 years after two years of ‘Blueprint’, the name of his health initiative. During the course of the documentary, his pace of ageing dropped from 0.69 to 0.64, meaning that for every year that goes by, he’ll age only by about two-thirds of that year.But before you rush to get yourself a biological age test, consider this. Since there are no established guidelines, it is tough to tell how accurate the test is. Also, researchers say it still won’t tell you how long you’ll live.Inputs: The New York Times