Twenty-five years after graduation, one classmate can appear a decade younger than the rest, another a decade older.
“People know that intuitively,” said Dr. Nir Barzilai, director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, “but they don’t understand that it’s a biology that we’re trying to discover.”
Scientists are working to quantify this phenomenon and put a number to a person’s “biological age” by looking at their cellular health instead of how many years they’ve been alive. Some of these measurements are now marketed as direct-to-consumer blood tests. But before you shell out hundreds of dollars to find out how old you really are, make sure you know what you’re paying for. Experts caution that while these tests are interesting in theory, and could be valuable research tools, they aren’t ready for prime-time.
At a recent conference where Dr. [Steve] Horvath spoke about the topic, an audience member said he had taken two different tests and received two different ages, 10 years apart. Dr. Horvath said that the man should have saved his money.
“I think you could say the best of them are not completely useless,” said Daniel Belsky, an associate professor of epidemiology at Columbia University who developed an epigenetic clock himself. “But these are not tried and tested clinical tools yet, so they’re more for the curious.”
