As I wrote last spring, we can efficiently test treatments for aging once we have an objective measure for the rate of aging. Without it, we’re left with the standard epidemiological: treating thousands of people and waiting for a few of them to die. I have predicted that methylation-based aging clocks will turn a page in the history of epidemiology.
Six years ago, UCLA biostatistician Steve Horvath realized the potential value of an aging clock and set out to measure human age using methylation markers in DNA from across the body. He used statistical pattern-recognition software to look for relationships between
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