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I’ve long known in that abstract, I’ll-take-that-under-advisement kind of way that chronic stress ages you. It wasn’t until this past week, when – in a gasp of breath stolen between the crush of too many deadlines – I looked at myself in the mirror and saw the glint of a gray hair that I understood: Chronic stress ages you.
Some of you are probably thinking, “Oh, boo-hoo, you’ve a single gray hair – I’ve a headful of them!” But what’s setting off alarms in my head isn’t so much the aesthetics of aging than the implication that my body may be biologically older than it is chronologically.
Somewhere out there, a wellness influencer is brandishing one of those trendy biological age tests at a camera and telling me I can uncover my own biological age at the irresistible price of $30 to over $1,000. Can these tests really tell me whether I’m prematurely aging?
If you ask scientists who are using the analytical tool these tests are based on to study aging, the answer is no – for individual people, at least.
Idan Shalev and Abner Apsley are two such researchers who use these tools – epigenetic clocks – in their work at Penn State and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, respectively. “Epigenetic clocks are helping scientists advance scientific research on the aging processes,” they write, “but they aren’t medical tests to measure individual health.”
They explain several reasons that biological aging tests don’t meet the standards of common medical tests, and why “for now, epigenetic clocks sold as biological age tests are best used and refined by researchers who are studying populations rather than individual people.”
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