A TRUE MEASURE OF AGING

Scientists have discovered a new biological clock ticking inside all our cells and figured out how to read it, the Los Angeles Times reports. UCLA researchers say this new “epigenetic clock” is calibrated by methylation, a natural process that modifies DNA over time by turning some genes on and others off. (click below to read more)
By studying some 8,000 methylated cell samples, geneticist Steve Horvath and his team mapped out how 353 DNA markers change throughout a lifetime in 51 different types of tissue. The calculations yielded some telling surprises. Women’s breast tissue, for example, appears to age about two or three years faster than the rest of their bodies, and cancerous tissue looks an average of 36 years older than healthy tissue. By contrast, people’s cardiac muscles were found to have a biological age an average of nine years younger than their birth dates would suggest. Horvath hopes that the new measuring technique may help predict whether a person’s body is becoming susceptible to diseases such as cancer. “If we see a drastic acceleration in tissue aging, that would suggest we should start looking for clues to an underlying problem,” he says.