What can and can't slow down aging: New study offers clues

• We all want to delay the aging process and gain extra healthy life years, but what are the best interventions to help you age well?
• A new study investigating epigenetic biomarkers as a measure of aging has found that certain dietary, lifestyle and pharmacological interventions may help us age more slowly.
• However, over-the-counter supplements appeared to have no effect on these biomarkers of aging.
• The authors caution that changes in epigenetic biomarkers do not prove that interventions slow aging, but can indicate biological changes related to aging faster than long-term studies can.

Aging is inevitable, but we all want to stay fit and healthy for as long as possible as we age. And biological age — a person’s physiological state rather than the actual time since their birth — is a good measure of how well you are aging.

Biomarkers in the blood, called epigenetic clocks, can measure biological age by looking at methyl groups attached to DNA. Previous research has shown that these epigenetic tags on DNA change over the course of a person’s lifetime.

Now, a study looking at these blood biomarkers has found that some dietary, lifestyle and pharmacological interventions may change the methylation patterns on a person’s DNA and indicate how fast they are aging.

The study, published in Nature Medicine, found that a Mediterranean diet, regular exercise, some diabetes and weight-management medications, and some anti-inflammatory drugs might be linked to slower aging.

Şebnem Ünlüişler, Chief Longevity Officer and genetic engineer at the London Regenerative Institute, who was not involved in the study, explained for Medical News Today:

“The important contribution of this study is its scale and standardised approach. The researchers harmonised data from 51 longitudinal intervention studies and applied the same panel of 16 epigenetic clocks and 94 additional DNA methylation biomarkers. This made it possible to compare how different biomarkers respond to different interventions more systematically. The study also suggests that newer biomarkers trained to predict mortality risk or the pace of aging, particularly DunedinPACE and PCGrimAge, may be more responsive than clocks designed primarily to predict chronological age.”

Corresponding author Raghav Sehgal, PhD, Associate Research Scientist in Psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine, said that while their results were interesting, they cannot prove that these interventions slow aging.

“Biomarkers are useful because they may let us see biological changes over months or years, rather than having to wait decades for outcomes like disease or death. But they are not a replacement for long-term studies. We still need to show that changes in these measures actually translate into people staying healthier, functioning better, or living longer,” Sehgal told MNT.