What can all these clocks tell us? It depends. But Horvath estimates that fewer than 10 are widely used in human studies, primarily to assess how diet, lifestyle, or supplements might affect aging. Other groups have developed similar clocks, and hundreds exist today. With this data, he trained an algorithm to predict a person’s chronological age from a cell sample.
Horvath built the clock using methylation data from 8,000 samples representing 51 body tissues and cell types. In 2013 he developed the eponymous Horvath clock, still among the best-known aging clocks today, which he calls a “pan-tissue” clock because it can estimate the age of pretty much any organ in the body. Horvath has worked on aging clocks ever since. He found that patterns of methylation could predict a person’s age in years, although the estimates differed on average by around five years from each person’s chronological age. “I fell off my chair, because the signal was huge for aging,” he says. But he also looked for links between the volunteers’ age and epigenetic markers. (Steve is straight and Markus is gay.)Īs a biostatistician, Horvath offered to analyze the results and found no link to sexual orientation. The study was looking for epigenetic markers in saliva samples that might explain sexual orientation. The first epigenetic aging clock was developed in 2011 when Steve Horvath at the University of California, Los Angeles, volunteered to participate in a study with his identical twin brother, Markus. And researchers are still grappling with a vital question: What does it mean to be biologically young? Among the hundreds of aging clocks developed in the last decade, though, accuracy varies widely. The big idea behind aging clocks is that they’ll essentially indicate how much your organs have degraded, and thus predict how many healthy years you have left.
Scientists have spent the last decade developing tools called aging clocks that assess markers in your body to reveal your biological age. But calculating it isn’t nearly as straightforward. Your biological age is likely a better reflection of your physical health and even your own mortality than your chronological age. That means your biological age could be quite different from your chronological age-the number of years you’ve been alive. Factors like these might make you age faster or slower than people born on the same day. Stress, sleep, and diet all influence how our organs cope with the wear and tear of everyday life. Age is much more than the number of birthdays you’ve clocked.
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