Ouroboros On Biomarkers and Telomere Length
From Ouroboros: "How old are you? At present, the best experimental approach to that question is to inspect your driver's license; we are very good at measuring chronological age, but far worse at measuring physiological age. ... Until we have such a tool, questions like 'how rapidly is this individual aging?' and 'is this treatment having a positive effect on the rate of aging?” will be meaningless. ... So, the race is on to find useful biomarkers of aging. ... Telomere length is a tantalizing biomarker for the aging process: it's positively correlated with life expectancy and negatively correlated with stress and disease. If telomere shortening is a biomarker of aging, then the measurable consequences of telomere shortening should also function as biomarkers, i.e., aging bodies should contain high levels of factors secreted by cells with dysfunctional or critically short telomeres. According to a recent paper by Jiang et al., this is indeed the case. ... The proteins identified here accumulate with age - [and] they accumulate faster in subjects who are both aged and suffering from age-related disease; in other words, in people whom we might intuitively assign to the 'more rapidly aging' category."
Link: http://ouroboros.wordpress.com/2008/08/21/telomere-dysfunction-markers-as-biomarkers-of-aging/