What Can be Achieved if the Epigenetic Clock is an Accurate Reflection of Aging?

The difference between having and not having an accurate, rapid, low-cost measure of biological age is night and day. If such a thing did exist, then it is immediately the case that a good few dozen interventions could be rapidly tested in humans, taking a month or two between before and after measurements. The cost is low enough that volunteer groups and philanthropy could manage it. Look at what Betterhumans is doing in trials of cheap senolytic compounds, for example, and then add a robust assessment to that in order to definitively say whether or not rejuvenation occurred. I expect that only a few of the obvious candidate interventions that people will put forward will in fact turn out to make a difference. This is still important: the absence of results for the rest should go some way towards shutting off useless work on supplements and dietary tinkering that absorbs a great deal of time and funding both within and without scientific community. Is there such a thing as an accurate, low-cost test that measures biological age, however? The later variants of the epigenetic clock might fit the bill, though it is still impossible to say whether or not they broadly reflect the causes of aging, or are tied to just a few narrow causes of aging. Absent a way to effectively reverse one of those narrow causes on its own, the mystery will likely persist; as of today, only senolytic therapies are capable of that feat, and they are not yet widely tested in humans. That the cloc...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs