We have two ages, one based on when we were born and the other on the age at which our body is functioning, which can be affected by our lifestyle choices. Tools designed by Dr. Morgan Levine measure the latter. In her new book, True Age, she argues that we should measure our own biological age, giving us information we could use to monitor and control our own individual aging process. Levine is an assistant professor of pathology and epidemiology at Yale University. She will join Altos Labs in June, a $3 billion anti-aging startup that is said to include Jeff Bezos.
What made you interested in the science of aging? Growing up with a dad. He was 54 when I was born and people assumed he was my grandpa. I was consumed with the fear that he might not be around when I was younger. My mother influenced me. I wondered if there was a way to delay the need for care for older adults.
Why is it important? Predicting risk of disease or death using chronological age is more useful than using it. It is not chronological time that drives the development of disease, but rather the biological changes taking place in our bodies. You can have outliers of up to 10 or more years, but most people will be within five years of their chronological age. The biological age is not the same as chronological age. We don't know how to modify it to the greatest extent, but we can make the clock tick slower or even go backwards in response to our actions. The first step is to get a valid and reliable measure, which my lab has been working on.
The process – biological ageing – that gives rise to cancer also causes diabetes, Alzheimer’s, heart disease and others
You would like to get our biological age measured once or twice a year. Is the science advanced enough for that? The tests need improvement. There isn't a standard for measuring biological age, and there isn't a perfect way to do it. They give people a sense of their health status. My lab has shown that these measures are better than the standard tests that physicians use. A more accurate picture can be given by doing it regularly, as people can put too much weight on a single measurement and things like being sick can misconstrue it.
There are tests for consumers. How might we measure? The cheapest and easiest way right now is based on regular clinical lab tests that people would get done as part of an annual physical. A method of estimating biological age that combines nine blood measures and a calculator is free online.
There are other ways as well. It is less likely for younger people to have diseases and high-risk conditions than it is for older people. I don't think measuring the length of the protective sections of DNA at the end of our chromosomes is a good predictor. My lab has worked on epigenetic clocks. Machine learning can be used to decode some of the chemical tags on our genes that can change with age. The results of our epigenetic measure match the results of the clinical test.
You have an interest in this. Elysium Health has a $499 epigenetic age test that uses a saliva sample. I decided to work with them because I wanted to make sure what they provided to consumers was the most valid and reliable version possible. I stopped working for the company last year and am not getting any compensation, even though it was too late to correct for this book. I promote the epigenetic test equally and have never received a dime for the clinical test.
Your biological age is five years younger than your chronological age. It might not feel good to discover you are older. Do you understand why people don't want to know? Completely. It's a choice. It's just a way to start evaluating things, a potential early wake-up call that could lead to behavior change. It is less worrisome than a genetic test because it is potentially modifiable.
Is it just the usual lifestyle factors we all know about, but it's hard to implement that can change biological age? The patterns we observe are not new. People who age slower don't smoke, don't drink, eat lots of plants, and experience less stress. Our lifespan is estimated to be 10% to 30% due to genetics. We will mostly be down to our behaviors as we age. We don't have control over the impact of socioeconomic status. Being poor reduces your life expectancy by about 10 years on average, which is similar to being a current smoker. We think it's chronic stress.
Caloric restriction is a way of increasing longevity in the tech world. Is there any evidence that it slows the aging process in humans? The only randomized clinical trial is the Calerie study. Some of the biological age estimates I have created have been applied and they seem to show some impact from CR, but we don't know. There is a question about whether the benefit would be maintained over time. CR should be at a level where you are still getting enough calories. It was only a 12% reduction in the Calerie study. I am not a fan of CR for most people, but there are better ways and less health risks with moderate CR.
You and your husband are leaving your current positions at Yale to join Altos Labs, which is focused on turning back the aging clock. What will you be doing? One goal is developing biological age measures to a level that they could be a surrogate end point in clinical trials to slow or reverse aging. I will continue to study epigenetic clocks. They're a bit of a black box. We don't really know what is going on with aging.
Altos Labs is funded by the mega-rich and they love funding anti-ageing research. Isn't this just an effort to prolong the lives of people? That isn't why I joined Altos Labs. I would have a hard time working on anything that increased health disparity. I joined because I want to keep the majority healthy. Scientists involved in aging research need to make the case that their work is worth it.
Wouldn't it be better to spend anti-ageing research funding on fighting diseases such as cancer, heart disease and so on, which we know are killers? Our medical system looks at diseases in a very different way than we do other diseases. The same process that gives rise to cancer is the same one that gives rise to diabetes, Alzheimer's, heart disease and others. It could deliver a bigger benefit if we can tackle the thing that causes all of them at the same time. You would be saving people from a lot of chronic diseases.
At what point does an obsession with staying young and healthy become negative? Shouldn't wisdom and grey hair be celebrated? I am struggling with this. I don't want people to think that I am old. Most people don't have a big effect on quality of life. Quality of life can be affected by diseases which can be prevented or slowed. A lot of people want to call it a disease. I don't agree. I don't think we could say that you arediseased now and you weren'tdiseased before, because that would stigmatise aging.
Is too much exercise a thing? It would be one of the best anti-aging interventions on the market if you bottled the effect of exercise and sold it as a pill. It is never too late. There is a sweet spot for optimal benefits. There seem to be diminishing returns after a certain point. It is difficult to know the optimal level of exercise for each of us, but most of us aren't even close to it.
What can you do to lower your age? I try to stay active and eat a mostly plant-based diet. I know I need to pay more attention to sleep and stress levels. I restrict the time window in which I eat. I don't count my calories, but implementing it isn't hard. I always calculate my biological age based on my clinical numbers from my annual physical. I leave my experimenting to the lab.
Is there any advice for those who want to biohack their aging process to quantify the effect of their regimes? I don't want people to put too much faith in every single metric. We aren't there yet, but we could in the future. Most of the regimes people might test will not show a sustained effect on biological age.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
