Thank you for visiting nature. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer. In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript. Dawson is chief executive of TruDiagnostic in Lexington, Kentucky, the company that sells the test.
Moffitt, who works at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, had spent decades with her colleagues collecting data from around 1, people to create the basis for one of the tests provided by TruDiagnostic. She had hoped that her work might one day inform medical decisions or provide a way for researchers to assess whether an anti-ageing treatment is having a positive effect on health. A stunt on a reality-TV show was not the kind of publicity she was aiming for.
Mixed feelings of enthusiasm and apprehension were common among researchers who spoke to Nature about efforts to develop tests that measure the impact of ageing on the body. Many of the measures look at chemical marks on DNA known as methylation, or at proteins or metabolites that can be found in the blood.
These biological markers, or biomarkers, could prove incredibly useful as part of burgeoning efforts to develop drugs and other therapies that would forestall the negative effects of ageing and increase what gerontologists refer to as the healthy lifespan.
Often, however, test results that use these biomarkers are interpreted and presented without a full reckoning of the uncertainties that plague them. Chen and others worry about the risk of elevated expectations as scientists take on the long and arduous task of validating these tests. For the moment, the field is on fire. A smorgasbord of tests to assess ageing already exists.
