Quantifying Biological Age: Blood Test #3 in 2022

[Mike Lustgarten]

 

 

[Mike Lustgarten]

Part II of this series: 

Blood Test #3 in 2022: Supplements, Diet

 

[tanuki]

hey Mike
It's a really amazing idea with tracking both your biological age and diet/lifestyle, I feel it can have a huge potential
Three questions:
1) How are you sure that manipulating biomarkers you can really change biological age?
True that they are strongly associated with the mortality risk but what if they are signs of aging not the root causes so manipulating them we trick the clock but don't fix underlying health problems.
2) Is it important to do all the test the same day in the same lab? Some of these test are not refunded by my health provider so I wanted to do them in 2 different clinic and separately CRP test so the blood samples may be taken week or two apart.
3) The only option I found for high sensitivity CRP testing is to take blood sample and send it by mail to the lab. Do you think the result would be reliable if they get to lab after few days exposed to outside temperatures?

[Mike Lustgarten]

Hey tanuki, the biological age calculators in the video have been published (peer-reviewed). Both calculators contain known biomarkers of organ and systemic function, so even without the cutesy biological age #, I've mostly resisted age-related changes, so far. The assumption would be that accelerated root causes would lead to the age-related phenotype, including increased inflammation, reduced insulin sensitivity, poor kidney function, etc, each of which is represented in these biological age tests. Alternatively, if we track these (and other biomarkers), we can optimize them while in youth while also learning what impacts them-my hypothesis is that aging and disease risk can be correspondingly slowed by holding on to health for longer. That also gives me more time to address the root causes (at the cellular and sub-cellular level), of which there are no current good treatments (maybe with the exception of rapamycin, but even that has limits). Yes, it's important to do the tests on the same day for increased reliability/minimized variability in the data, but as long as you're consistent with that approach, it's the best that you can do. In my next video (tomorrow), I used at-home testing, and it was as good as the gold standard for blood testing, venipuncture, so that's good news. Note that all at-home tests may not be as good, so that's also something to consider.