Calcium Alpha-Ketoglutarate Supplementation Reduces Epigenetic Age in Humans

The company Ponce De Leon Health claims that a recent pilot study of calcium alpha-ketoglutarate supplementation results in an average reduction of 8.5 years of epigenetic age via the DNA methylation test offered by TrueMe Labs. This being the supplement industry, expect to have to wade through a lot of dubious and excessive marketing to find any solid information about what actually happened here. The best pace to start is with the 2019 paper on the effects of calcium alpha-ketoglutarate in mice, which is a reputable study authored by reputable researchers. Delivered late in life, this intervention reduced frailty to a meaningful degree, but with only a modest effect on life span. It did not reduce senescent cell burden, but did reduce inflammatory signaling - and chronic inflammation is an important aspect of degenerative aging. The important point to consider here is that the TrueMe Labs assay is not a relabeling of any of the more established epigenetic clocks, those with significant research associated with their behavior. It is is its own beast, an independently developed test. It uses only 13 DNA methylation sites, and so it is very possible that it is much more sensitive to some interventions than others, in comparison to, say, the original Horvath clock, depending on which mechanisms influence those sites. Thus one cannot take any of the established research into the better studied clocks and use it to inform expectations as to how the TrueMe Labs assay will b...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs