I'm pleased to note that Chris Patil's Ouroboros now joins the extremely informal blogging collective gracing the homepage of the MPrize for anti-aging research. Welcome aboard!

Given that Telomolecular is in the press of late, alongside interesting research on telomere length and stress, you should take a look at the latest Ouroboros post on telomere science:

One of my fantasies (and I think it should be the fantasy of every biogerontologist) is to be able to walk up to a human subject with my handy futuristic and minimally invasive device, and make a measurement to determine how old they are. I don’t mean their chronological age, but rather how old they are really — let's call it "physiological age", a value that would (in the fantasy) be more powerfully predictive of risk for age-related disease and decline. Intuitionally and anecdotally we know that different people simply age at different rates, but at the moment it's painfully hard to quantify what we mean by that.

I don't necessarily think telomere measurements are a magic biomarker bullet, but these results make me wonder whether they might end up being an important part of the toolkit.

You'll find more on the search for low-cost biomarkers for aging back in the Fight Aging! archives. It's worth noting that the SENS approach advocated by biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey is something of an end-run around this absence of easy biomarkers, amongst other things. If you have any interest in living a longer, healthier life, you should read up on it.

Technorati tags: aging, blogging, gerontology, medical research

Posted by Reason at August 23, 2006 11:46 PM | TrackBack (0)