Reviewing Present Biomarkers of Aging

Today's open access paper, with more than 120 contributing authors, is a tour of the broad topic of biomarkers of aging, an attempt to say at least something about every aspect of cellular biochemistry and functional capacity that is either used or proposed to be used to measure biological age, from grip strength to epigenetic clocks. Biological age is in one sense an aspirational concept, a way to measure the progression of aging that will accurately reflect mortality and disease risk. In another sense, biological age is self-evidently real. Different people age at different rates, and exhibit very different risk levels for age-related disease at a given chronological age. In this sense, biological age is a very complicated state of a very complicated system, a state that we cannot measure comprehensively, even setting aside the presently incomplete understanding of cellular biology and the systems of the body. Thus scientists search for shortcuts, measurements that are practical and attainable, but nonetheless do a fair job of reflecting the highly complex state of aging. These options are what is usually meant by biomarkers of aging. The challenge with all such approaches is that we'd like to use them to assess the performance of potential rejuvenation therapies. A given rejuvenation therapy will only influence a subset of the important mechanisms that drive degenerative aging, usually a narrow subset. That in turn means that any given biomarker of aging will likely...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs