![]() ![]() Observations of age impacting on this mechanism have been reported for more than 50 years and suggested a role in age-related disease. Epigenetics encapsulates the chemical modifications and packaging of the genome that influence or indicate its activity, with strict definitions requiring inheritance through mitotic cell division. In this decade, we have discovered the remarkable power of epigenetic changes to estimate an individual’s age. Therefore, many biological measures, such as p16 ink4a tissue levels, circulating CRP, creatinine, and fasting glucose, as well as telomere length all correlate with aging. The cellular and molecular hallmarks of aging include changes associated with cell senescence, dysregulated nutrient sensing, and stem cell exhaustion, among others. It would also aid in testing interventions that attempt to modulate the aging process. Measurement of this relative “biological” aging may allow pre-emptive targeted health-promoting interventions, perhaps in a personalized and disease-specific fashion. There is considerable population variation in the rate at which people visibly age as well as become impaired by age-related frailty and disease. This aim of maximizing the “healthspan” makes obtaining accurate measures of aging-related pathology essential, to gauge its speed, decipher the changes that occur, and potentially unlock how aging acts as a disease risk factor. Increasing the productivity and reducing the disease affliction in these extended years7 would be clearly beneficial for both the individual and society. This leads to the undesirable outcome of many years of this prolonged lifespan being spent in ill health, with an associated massive health care burden. However, the success in reducing mortality has not been matched with a reduction in chronic disease. This demographic phenomenon is changing our societal make-up, from only ~130 million being 65 years or older (~5% of the world population) in 1950, to a predicted ~1.6 billion people (~17%) by 2050. Alongside this, the unprecedented gain in the average lifespan in humans, since the mid-twentieth century, has dramatically increased both the number of older people and their proportion in the population. A key question in biology is to understand why and how we age. ![]()
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