A CUTTING edge test has the power to tell customers their true biological age using just a saliva sample.
New methods claim to accurately estimate the number of remaining years in a person’s life.
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Your age represents the number of complete revolutions around the Sun you have been on Earth for.
Measuring age in these terms does not factor in the condition of your cells or the overall health of your body.
New companies are working to reinvent how we calculate age with “biological age” tests.
The tests are said to produce more accurate insights into how much time a person may have left to live.
One test measures the “telomeres” of patients’ cells – these are the expendable caps of DNA strands that are shorn off when cells replicate.
As we age, the length of the telomere is shortened, leading to visible signs of aging and vulnerability to disease.
Elysium Health, a company offering a biological age test for $499, tests more than 100,000 “methylation patterns” in a customer’s DNA.
The result is a view into a person’s “epigenetic clock” – their age based on the biochemical analysis of their DNA.
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These tests do not do anything to reverse the effects of aging but the results can alter a person’s perspective on their future.
The son of a tested Elysium customer told The Guardian, “It was such a relief for her, because it gives her a newfound hope about life planning.”
“Knowing how fast she is really ageing, it gives her a renewed sense of self and how she should live in the upcoming decade.”
The same article quoted one of the academics behind alternative methods of measuring age saying “biological age is a better predictor of morbidity risk than chronological age.”
The “longevity movement” is a collection of scientists and consumers dead set on slowing or even reversing aging.
Dave Asprey is an author and entrepreneur who predicts he’ll live to 180 based on his method of ‘biohacking’ – he’s spent millions to reduce the effect of aging on his body.
