And I'll be joining them. Stephanie Arnett/MIT Technology Review | Adobe Stock This week, I officially signed up for an unusual competition. One that rewards competitors for getting younger.
I recently turned 40, and I don’t need reminding that both time and my chronological age only tick forward. But this game is focused on competitors’ biological ages—figures that are meant to provide a better way to measure the age-related health of our organs and bodies. Over a six-month period, around 500 of us will try to reverse our biological age as measured in a bunch of different ways.
There’s even a leaderboard! The winners will include the person who shows the greatest difference between their chronological and biological age, as well as the person who manages to reverse their biological age the most. The competition is the brainchild of the neuroscientist and physician Christin Glorioso, who is also founder and CEO of Neuro Age Therapeutics. The company offers tools to track brain health and aging and is running a trial to find out if biological brain age can predict the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.
Glorioso says she has several goals for the Younger contest. The first, she tells me, is to “explain to the world what aging clocks are.” Regular Checkup readers will be familiar with these tools, but for the uninitiated, they are basically designed to measure biological age. Many measure chemical signatures that form a layer on top of our DNA and seem to change with age.
But others might involve looking at proteins or lipids in blood. Some are designed to measure functional health, while others predict when a person will die. There are more than a hundred clocks out there, and they probably each capture a specific aspect of the biological process of aging.
These clocks are proving very useful for scientists, who use them to study aging and development in humans and many other species. But using them to estimate the biological age of an individual person is more controversial. They’re just not good enough for that yet.
Part of the problem is that we don’t really understand what each clock is capturing. Glorioso hopes that data collected through the Younger contest might help answer that question. She’s hoping to generate “the world’s most comprehensive clock dataset.” Some longevity clinics try to get around the limits of biological age testing by using multiple clocks.
That’s this competition’s approach too. As a standard competitor, I’ll be sending a blood spot sample to Tru Diagnostic, a company that measures epigenetic chemical groups on DNA and offers to reveal an overall biological age as well as a person’s pace of aging and the biological ages of each of 11 organ systems, including the heart and brain. I’ll get a brain age score from Neuro Age once I complete the cognitive tasks on offer.
I’ll also submit some physical measures like grip strength. And I’ll upload a series of selfies to an app developed by a team at Harvard that promises to tell me my face age. That’s exactly what it sounds like—an estimate of how old my face looks.
I’m intrigued to see my scores, even though I know I shouldn’t put too much stock in them. The first time I took a test, four years ago, the company I used gave me a biological age that matched my chronological age, which was a little disappointing and, if I’m honest, a bit underwhelming. A year later, the same company told me I had a young heart but a relatively old brain, liver, and hormonal system.
My lifestyle hasn’t changed much since then. Will the years have made much difference? (Ultra competitors—who pay $4,499 rather than the $999 cost of regular entry—are also offered a range of other blood tests and clocks, as well as MRI and DEXA scans. I’ve got complimentary press access to the standard package.) Glorioso is also hoping to gather information about the effects of some purported longevity approaches.
During the competition, some participants will be offered red-light masks, access to a sa...
Source: MIT Technology Review · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing