This week, I officially signed up for an unusual competition. One that rewards competitors for getting younger. I recently turned 40, and I don’t need reminding that both time and my chronological age only tick forward.
But this game is focused on competitors’ biological ages—figures that are meant to provide a better way to measure the age-related health of our organs and bodies. Over a six-month period, around 500 of us will try to reverse our biological age as measured in a bunch of different ways. There’s even a leaderboard!
The winners will include the person who shows the greatest difference between their chronological and biological age, as well as the person who manages to reverse their biological age the most. The competition is the brainchild of the neuroscientist and physician Christin Glorioso, who is also founder and CEO of NeuroAge Therapeutics. The company offers tools to track brain health and aging and is running a trial to find out if biological brain age can predict the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.
Glorioso says she has several goals for the Younger contest. The first, she tells me, is to “explain to the world what aging clocks are.” Regular Checkup readers will be familiar with these tools, but for the uninitiated, they are basically designed to measure biological age. Many measure chemical signatures that form a layer on top of our DNA and seem to change with age.
But others might involve looking at proteins or lipids in blood. Some are designed to measure functional health, while others predict when a person will die. There are more than a hundred clocks out there, and they probably each capture a specific aspect of the biological process of aging.
These clocks are proving very useful for scientists, who use them to study aging and development in humans and many other species. But using them to estimate the biological age of an individual person is more controversial. They’re just not good enough for that yet.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
