#Real age vs chronological age skin#
And then take a skin sample or a saliva sample or a cheek swab and get a different biological age based on those cells. We can take a blood sample from someone and find the biological age of their blood. This allows for a more nuanced understanding of a person’s biological age across different organs to give a more comprehensive understanding of their overall health and aging. The exciting thing about using DNA methylation to measure biological age, though, is that we can calculate different biological ages for different parts of the body. Your biological age in your blood is often similar to that in your saliva because they have many of the same cell types. We see very specific patterns of DNA methylation when we look across the entire genome and how it changes with age: We look at those patterns and predict what someone’s biological age is based on hundreds of thousands of these sites that are a reflection of your overall health and functioning.Ĭompanies that offer at-home testing measure biological age in saliva as an indicator of a person’s overall biological age while most scientific studies use blood for this measure. And there are specific areas of the genome where there’s increased methylation with age and other areas where there’s decreased methylation with age.
DNA methylation is basically a chemical modification to your DNA-it doesn’t change the sequence of your DNA, but it does regulate which genes get turned on and which get turned off. To calculate biological age, we use epigenetic data, specifically DNA methylation, from a blood sample or another source (more on that in a minute).
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