HORVUTH’S AGING CLOCK IS A BOMB

HORVUTH’S AGING CLOCK IS A BOMB:  Epigenetic age estimated by changes in DNA methylation predicts mortality

“If you can’t measure something, you can’t improve it.” This concept, which some trace back to William Thomson, Baron Kelvin, is pretty obviously true – at least in the hard sciences. Peter Drucker’s upgraded version, “What’s measured improves,” isn’t as axiomatic, but it tends to be true.

That’s why Steve Horvath’s discovery of an epigenetic aging clock is so important.

Traditionally, anti-aging biotechnologies have been measured in animals, mostly mice, using traditional controlled and blinded studies. Such studies compared the lifespans of treated and untreated animals. As such, they required both groups to die before statistical analysis could proceed.

Given primates’ long lifespans, such studies are impractical because they would take so long and cost so much. Horvath helped solve that problem by developing a biochemical test that can quickly show that a therapy is slowing, accelerating, or even reversing the aging process in humans.

Thanks to Horvath and his colleagues, biological age can now be measured, and anti-aging therapies tested quickly. This is a revolution of a magnitude that few yet appreciate.

Already, in fact, it has produced results that have shaken the world of biogerontology. Specifically, Greg Fahy’s human trial of human growth hormone, metformin and DHEA, has produced evidence of a 2.5-year age reversal in only one year. Horvath, incidentally, contributed to that study.

Obviously, this therapy will demonstrate diminishing marginal returns but the very concept that the clock of aging can be reversed at least temporarily is a meme bomb. It will change the way society thinks about aging. And soon.

Even more effective anti-aging and age reversal therapies are in labs now and will emerge, probably in the coming year. Because we can now measure their impacts on aging quickly, a generation suffering from old age will learn of them and want them before it’s too late.