I find it frustrating when longevity influencers claim that aging clocks show they have substantially de-aged themselves. Often by years.
A tweet might be: “I ate nothing tasty for a year (or I took this expensive supplement) and now aging clocks show I’m 5 years younger.”
Of course, sometimes those making such health flexing statements have links to the supplements being sold or have some other financial interest in supposed anti-aging methods. Other times, I think they just truly believe or want to believe the clocks.
Now, more questions have come up about these epigenetic clocks and other forms of health/aging clocks. Will these clocks get better or melt like something out of Dali? Before we jump into it, there’s still time to take The Niche poll: is aging a disease?
Aging clocks can be radically skewed by exercise
Here’s the new pub that brought this time: Epigenetic Age Monitoring in Professional Soccer Players for Tracking Recovery and the Effects of Strenuous Exercise, Aging Cell. One of the key findings here is that intense exercise strongly but temporarily swayed the clock reading such as from DNAmFitAge. This suggests these particular clocks are not actually measuring biological age. They are swayed by other factors like recent exercise. Injury can also change the DNA methylation patterns measured by these clocks.
There are some possible silver linings here. If you’re a glass-half-full kind of person, the upside to this is likely that regular exercise could actually be beneficial for better aging. We, of course, already knew this, but it’s interesting. The clocks are also likely to be useful tools for assessing cute impacts of certain things on epigenetic states.
More recommended reads
- Multi-Region Brain Organoids Integrating Cerebral, Mid-Hindbrain, and Endothelial Systems, Advanced Science.
- A few UCLA researchers spoke out about how the Trump Administration freeze on their grants could harm their stem cell research. Samantha Butler and Ben Novitch are both doing important work that is at risk now. It’s terrible times. I don’t know that these grant freezes are even legal.
- Lineage announces dosing of first patient in new clinical study of OPC1 for subacute and chronic spinal cord injury. There’s real hope for treating spinal cord injury using stem cells. It’s just be a slow process over the years so far.
-
This company claimed to ‘de-extinct’ dire wolves. Then the fighting started, Nature. This piece has more about Colossal Biosciences and some of its critics. The story is getting old but Colossal isn’t backing down. Now, a few months after what I saw as the bogus dire wolf announcement, I still believe that the company made a big misstep by wrongly claiming de-extinction here. I expect Colossal to wrongly announce it has de-extincted woolly mammoths too sometime in the next few years. How about spending hundreds of millions protecting species that still exist?
More FDA rollercoasting: Makary brings Prasad back
- As many of you know, CBER Director Vinay Prasad who also was the FDA’s CMO and CSO, was reportedly forced out. Perhaps in part this happened because of pressure from right-wing activists like Laura Loomer. Now FDA Commissioner Marty Makary said in a recent video that Prasad wasn’t forced out and he hopes Prasad will rejoin the agency. See the Tweet below with this video. And since I first wrote the draft of this, Prasad is now officially back atop CBER. Keep your popcorn handy for watching this FDA and CBER. More drama is sure to come. Talk about a chaotic agency.