Epigenetic clock: is aging reversible after all?

What can you do to give your cells an energy boost? How should you organize your life, your diet, exercise, sleep, cocktail of supplements to stay young – or maybe even younger? Is rejuvenation even possible?

Epigenetic clock determines how old you really are

In 2013, the German-American aging researcher and human geneticist Steve Horvath presented a groundbreaking measuring instrument for our true age, for our “biological age”: the epigenetic clock.

However, this algorithm-based revolution in aging research has nothing to do with a timepiece like many people wear on their wrists. This “clock” needs a drop of blood from you – or a little saliva (you can find various providers of epigenetic age tests on the Internet, for example). That means: She wants your genetic material, yours DNAand takes a close look at everything that has settled there.

There are very flexible switches that determine what is read from your genetic material, which enzymes, which proteins are formed and which are not. These switches are very small molecules called methylations, made famous by Steve Horvath.

A regenerating cocktail of active ingredients

Each age shows its very special methylation pattern. So today it is possible to see how “old” this cell actually is by analyzing your cell DNA (from your saliva or a drop of blood). Is she as fit as the cells of a typical peer, are her activity patterns “age appropriate”?

Or does this pattern reveal relentlessly that your cells have aged more? Or – what everyone will hope – are you younger than your year of birth is documented? So are your cells significantly fitter? Horvath’s epigenetic clock heralded a turning point in aging research, because now it is actually possible to measure whether a makeover is working.

Rejuvenation: is it even possible?

Today there are affordable rejuvenation procedures on the market and they are widely used. But could it ever actually measure “rejuvenation”? The best-known study on this was actually not a study because there were far too few participants, only nine men over the age of 50. But the study caused a sensation in aging research: TRIIM was her name, the leader Prof. Greg Fahy from Stanford University.

Almost every night for more than a year, the nine men injected their stomachs with a cocktail of drugs that Fahy believed could rejuvenate the thymus gland. The most important part: the well-known human growth hormone. The thymus gland sits behind our breastbone and unfortunately ages terribly quickly. It is responsible for our immune memory and becomes fat miserably from the age of 15. At around 60 there is nothing left, the immune system suffers greatly.

So what was the result of the TRIIM study? After one year, the thymus had regenerated in seven of the nine men. And the amazing thing was: The epigenetic clock had run backwards – in everyone. In the end they were epigenetically two and a half years younger!

This TRIIM study has thus presented the first tenuous evidence that aging is, after all, reversible. And: Without the epigenetic clock, it would not have been possible to prove it.

This article first appeared in the My life print edition 11/2022.

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