Aging Well: The New Health Goal
Mar 06, 2023
Our concept of aging and lifespan are changing. No longer content with hoping to add a few years to their lives, people want to be able to feel healthy and vibrant as long as possible.
Knowing just our chronological age is only part of the equation. How our cells are aging is another.
This has led to a focus on understanding the impact of a person's biological age. A person’s chronological age describes how long a person has been alive. The biological age describes how well they are aging at the DNA and cellular level.
Aging Starts Earlier Than You Think
It turns out that aging is not just about our older years. All of our life experiences - and even those of our parents - can impact how well we age throughout life.
Science has shown us that the processes involved in aging start long before our golden years.
Being proactive throughout life is the best way to optimize our healthy aging. But it's never too late to start, for our cells and DNA are incredibly resilient.
Healthspan vs Lifespan
Healthspan – years of good health - is now replacing lifespan as the ultimate goal. This has spawned a huge global industry with people spending hundreds of billions of dollars on services ranging from aesthetic products and procedures to complementary and alternative therapies to optimize mental and cellular health, and that is only expected to grow with an aging population.
But how do you know what will work best for you? Rather than guessing, and spending resources on things you don't need - or worse, that don't actually help - it's become clear that we need a roadmap to guide us through this complex and confusing process.
Fortunately, scientists have been working hard to find better answers. Recent breakthroughs have provided us with much more accurate ways to assess someone's health status from the inside out.
Removing the Guesswork
Knowing how to objectively measure the impact of these strategies to increase a person’s healthspan is a key driver behind development of technologies from lab tests that evaluate biochemical pathways to ones that look at biological aging.
Two tests that evaluate biological aging are telomeres and epigenetics - DNA methylation.
While telomeres have been around for a while, using epigenetics for biological aging is a more recent addition to assessing someone's health. Each one provides different information, and together they are a pretty powerful duo in the quest for improving healthspan.
Be there for all the important moments in life - now and for years to come. Knowing your Biological Age gives you a great starting point for creating personalized strategies to help you have the health to live the life you desire.