Your answers to such questions are then compared to the average score calculated from a large cohort of relatively healthy people of the same chronological age. The online vitality test uses an algorithm that takes into account details such as your weight, your eating habits, the amount of exercise you take, your cholesterol levels and your weekly alcohol consumption. The first, including the Vitality Age test, are based on an assessment of your overall health and behaviour. Tests that claim to measure biological age usually take one of two forms. Physical differences clearly exist between old and young, but measuring these differences with any kind of confidence is difficult as they can vary hugely from one person to the next.

They could also be used to check how effective new anti-ageing therapies are.īut reliable biomarkers for ageing have so far proved elusive. Such biomarkers of ageing could be used to identify people at risk of disease, prompting preventative measures in lifestyle or early treatment. Instead, some measurement of biological age that identifies an age-related change in body function or composition could more accurately predict your chances of developing age-related disease.

As such, the number of years you have been alive – your chronological age – is not necessarily a good predictor of how well you are ageing. For these interventions to be successful, clear read-outs of how well our bodies are ageing are first required.Īgeing rates between individuals that share the same birth year can vary significantly. A better understanding of the mechanisms that cause ageing could lead to interventions to improve age-related health. As the global population gets steadily older, this poses serious social, medical and economic costs to society. And if ageing is governed by biology then it is amenable to manipulation.īeing older is a major risk factor for several diseases. However, recent scientific advances have revealed that the physical decline associated with growing old is caused by an underlying biological process, influenced by both genetic and environmental factors. But how accurate are these tests and could they somehow be used to predict your future health?Īgeing has long been considered an inevitable consequence of life. They claim that such tests can measure how well your body is coping with the rigours of life. The presence of short telomeres should act as a warning sign, prompting you to make some lifestyle changes, including a better diet, more exercise, more sleep and an increase of vitamin supplements.ĭo you think your biological age matches your chronological age? If not, you should consider making some lifestyle changes to prevent pre-mature aging and lower your risk of age-related disease.Researchers are developing tests to calculate your true biological age. If your telomeres are shorter than the average length for your age group, you are more pre-disposed toward age-related illness, like cancer or heart disease. While looking at the telomere of a specific cell cannot accurately determine the precise age of all cells in your body, it does provide a relative indication of how fast you are aging overall. By measuring the length of the telomere, doctors can figure out how much time the cells have left before they die, and thus how much you have aged. Each time a cell reproduces, the telomere gets shorter, and when it gets too short, the DNA strands fall apart and the cell dies. The telomere acts as a cap that holds the DNA strands together in our cells. But how many people do you know that lived to see 120 or, for that matter, even 90 years old? Studies have found that Humans are not living as long as we possibly could because of poor diet and over-exposure to excessive toxins, carcinogens and stress.īiologists are able to determine “biological” results from looking at an individual’s telomere. Scientifically, humans should be able to live to the age of 120 years.

Chronological age and biological age