While your chronological age will always progress at a fixed rate, biological age can show a summary of how a person’s lifestyle choices and behaviors are affecting their body.

Being 70 years old is itself not an accurate predictor of health and disease risk, because everyone is aging a bit differently, on a biological level. Lifestyle, genetic predispositions, and experiences all affect cellular processes, those things also affect aging. 

This molecular process of aging could be very slow, or it could progress rapidly. Everyone’s rate of aging is unique to them, customized by their rich and complex lives. Aging can appear outwardly in skin condition and hair color, and inwardly with increased frailty, lower immune response, and the loss of things like bone density and motor skills.

TruDiagnostic 

The Epigentis Company

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Telomere Length

Telomeres are repeating sequences of nucleoprotein caps located at the ends of chromosomes. Each time a cell undergoes mitosis, a section of these nucleotides is cleaved, and the telomere shortens incrementally. This is an overly simplistic description given that oxidative stress is also associated with telomere shortening, and multiple mechanisms exist for telomere lengthening as well. It was the most investigated aging biomarker, as of 2021.

A relationship between telomere length and several diseases has been found, and it has successfully predicted health outcomes such as physical function and morbidity. However, several studies have found no association between age or mortality and telomere length.

While Telomere length may be associated with various disease processes, its use as a predictor of biological age is so far contradictory. It has a low predictive power. Likewise, there has been very little clinical evidence of a patient’s ability to deliberately lengthen telomeres.

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DNA Methylation

And Epigenetic Clocks

Methylation can change the activity of a DNA segment without changing the sequence. 

The term epigenetic “clock” refers to tools that analyze DNA methylation levels within a set of Cytosine-PhosphateGuanine (CpG) sites and are generally acknowledged as accurate measures of biological age. 

There are several DNA Methylation clocks that have been created, and more are in development. So far, DNA Methylation clocks are the current best predictors of mortality. 

In addition to measuring mortality risk, some markers have the added capability of predicting the risk of developing specific disease processes, like congestive heart failure, coronary heart disease, and type 2 diabetes. 

The correlation between these transcriptomic age predictors and chronological age is significant, even in large-scale meta-analysis and longitudinal studies. 

“Epigenetic Clock” is a broad term for a host of different algorithms that use DNA methylation to detect aging and health statuses.

Individual clocks may be most effective only using a certain tissue, or it could perform similarly among various tissue types. 

Some algorithms are trained to detect methylation that flags epigenetic-influenced diseases, while others detect phenotypes. Some algorithms can even accurately predict time-to-death.

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Why Use Epigenetic Clocks?

• It is the best clinical biomarker for aging and disease prediction

• It’s an incredibly useful tool for tracking the effectiveness of anti-aging interventions in real-time.

• It can give patients a stronger feeling of control over their own long-term health. 

• Since we use a combination of different algorithms, you receive a broader and more complete picture of health, compared to other biomarkers. 

DNA Methylation may be a fairly new biomarker compared to something like telomere length, but there’s already a host of research showing its unprecedented potential as a clinical tool for both aging and disease prediction.

Methylation affects every part of the body, and it can be both changed and reversed by direct patient action.
Epigenetic markers like DNA Methylation can be changed by patient actions, unlike the genome. DNA Methylation offers a high predictive power for long-term disease risks, impacts of aging – and can offer real-time feedback on how interventions are affecting individual patients. It offers patients a feeling of control over their own health and future, where a genetic test’s results are set in stone.

Epigenetic Biological Aging is the baseline summary of your entire body’s aging. 

DunedinPACE shows your current Pace of Aging – a speedometer snapshot of how accelerated your aging currently is. This test is the most predictive of age-related health outcomes, and the most sensitive to short-term changes.

Extrinsic Age uses immune cell deconvolution – a way of analyzing ratios of cell types in the blood – to make the Biological Age measurement even more accurate, by accounting for your immune system’s influence on aging.

Intrinsic Age shows the baseline age of your body if your immune system’s impact was removed entirely.

Together Intrinsic and Extrinsic Age create your Immune Age. 

We recently added Telomere Age – an aging metric created with Telomere Length to focus on cellular replication and cellular fate.

These, along with our trait reports and advanced metrics, work together to form a larger picture of your ever-changing health and lifespan.

Together, they create the TruAge Complete Collection.