Sunday, November 3, 2013
Reading Your Biological Clock
UCLA professor Steve Horvath used eight thousand samples of fifty-one tissue and cell types in order to develop a new way to understand the biological clock. Specifically, he used over 350 genetic markers to track the relationship age and methylation levels. From his results, he noticed that different types of tissue aged differently when compared to different tissue found on the same body. Specifically, he noticed that healthy breast tissue was two to three years older than the rest of a woman's body when compare to abnormal cancerous breast tissue that, was on average, twelve years older than the rest of another woman's body. He also observed that biological clock is not moving at a constant rate. The clock ticks faster during the earlier stages of life up until the age of twenty. From there, the biological clock was shown to slow down until a constant rate was reached.
I understand that everyone's clock is not same, but this new biological clock can be used as a guide to help us indicate potential issues within our tissue. With more studies, patterns could be developed to indicated a deleterious change compared to a normal change. With further research, people can start to understand some of the processes related to primary aging and the changes that are associated with it on a molecular level. By knowing the relative age of different tissues within the body, specific preventative medicines could be designed to slow down aging in order to prevent possible disease. Aging is a very complex process. Understanding its fundamental processes can help correct age-related diseases or lower risks for diseases.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I like this article because it seems like the theme of this science is to better understand your body and how it works so you can take care of it, but I feel like this is unrealistic on mass scale because everyone's body is so different and everyone grows out differently that I can't imagine how this information could be useful in the future. I fail to see the connection between age, relation and methyl content as being a good or a bad thing. Knowing the age of your cells is wonderful thing to know but it doesn't seem like this is an effective method to be used regularly in medicine. We can most definitely learn from this, but I don't think doctors will keep the age of everyone's cells.
ReplyDeleteI found this article incredibly interesting. It's common knowledge that people age at different rates, but I never stopped to think about how individual tissues age. I wonder what causes certain tissues to age faster than others. Is it location? Exposure to sunlight or radiation? Overuse? It is was also interesting to note that the cancerous breast was twelve years older than any other tissue on her body. It is normal to think about mutations that lead to cancer, but what is the link between cancer and the aging process?
ReplyDelete