Understanding Biological Age: What it Says About Aging and the Effectiveness of Measuring It

When talking about age, it is usual that the first thing that comes to mind is the amount of time a person has to live. However, although there are individuals who may be of the same age, it is common for some to appear to be more or younger than others. This phenomenon is related to what scientists call “biological age.” In simple terms, that concept refers to cellular health, instead of how many years one has lived.
Co-director of the Center for Healthy Longevity at the National University of Singapore, Andrea Britta Maier, gave a more precise definition to the New York Times, saying that it is “the accumulation of damage that we can measure in our body.” Such damage appears with natural aging and varies depending on the behaviors of each person and their environment. For example, habits such as drinking alcohol excessively or smoking can accelerate these processes, according to Harvard Medical School academic Jesse Poganik. For decades, the scientific community did not know how to measure biological age. However, in 2013, professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, Steve Horvath, proposed using “a clock” based on the field of epigenetics. Likewise, he analyzed data on genetic changes from thousands of subjects and developed an algorithm that allowed a correlation to be made. Along these lines, subsequent research has determined that biological age is linked to aspects such as life expectancy and health.
Still, the director of the Aging Research Institute at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Nir Barzilai, warned the Times that “it’s still a biology we’re trying to figure out.” Currently you can find companies that offer tests to determine your biological age. According to the aforementioned media, in most cases they only ask for blood or saliva samples and it is necessary to pay an amount of approximately 300 dollars, that is, about $265,000 Chilean pesos at the current exchange rate. That may seem attractive to those interested in longevity, but there are a number of considerations that should be taken into account before ordering these tests. Firstly, specialists have warned that epigenetic clocks are designed to evaluate large groups of people and not individuals, so they cannot provide precise details about the health of someone specifically. That is why the results of these commercial tests usually lack veracity. This was suggested by Horvath, who assured that he knew of the case of a person who took two different tests and in which he obtained two different results, with a distance of 10 years between them. Columbia University specialist Daniel Belsky said that “you could say that the best (tests) are not completely useless.” “They are not yet proven clinical tools, so they are more for the curious,” he emphasized. Despite this, experts dedicated to this area hope that in the future effective methods validated by the scientific community can be found to reverse biological age. At the moment, there are still experiments to think about treatments applicable to patients.