Want to know your "life span"?

Researchers at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health have developed a new blood test to measure the rate of biological aging

"What's unique about DunedinPACE is that while other tests are designed to measure a person's age or age, DunedinPACE measures how fast or slow you are aging," said Daniel Belsky, Ph

This design could make DunedinPACE a more sensitive tool for detecting the effects of interventions designed to slow aging or exposure to accelerate the aging process

While other measures of aging aim to capture all aging-related changes during life, ours focuses on recent changes

DunedinPACE, developed by Belsky and colleagues at Duke and Otago Universities, tracked changes in 19 biomarkers of organ system integrity in a birth cohort of 1,000 Dunedin study respondents, who were surveyed between 1972 and 1973.

Using a single-year birth cohort to develop the measure ensures that DunedinPACE is free from biases including survival bias, differences in exposure history that can affect studies comparing older and younger adults

In addition to the Dunedin study, the researchers used data from the Understanding Society Study, the Normative Aging Study, the Framingham Heart Study, and the Environmental Risk (E-Risk) Longitudinal Twin Study

In the current analysis, DunedinPACE accelerated in middle-aged and older adults with increased risk of chronic disease, disability, and mortality; across the lifespan, DunedinPACE correlated with biological age measures from blood chemistry and DNA methylation data and studies Participants' subjective perceptions of their own health

"In conclusion, Dunedinspace represents a new measure of aging that can complement existing DNA methylation measures of aging and help advance the frontiers of aging science," Belsky noted

The current analysis identifies Dunedinspace as a new single-time-point measurement to quantify the rate of aging from whole blood samples that is readily achievable in most DNA methylation datasets, allowing immediate integration into a wide range of existing data The test was performed centrally as a complement to existing methods of measuring methylation in aging

"There is growing interest in techniques for measuring biological age, which is how much a person's biological age is older or younger than predicted by their birth date

Magazine

eLife

10.

Article Title

DunedinPACE, a DNA methylation biomarker of the pace of aging