#386 - Aging clocks—what they measure, how they work, and their clinical and real-world relevance

Hey everyone, welcome to the Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, and we've established a great team of analysts to make this happen. It is extremely important to me to provide all of this content without relying on paid ads.

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And this is a topic that many of you have been asking about, aging clocks. So in this episode, I explain what aging clocks are and the difference between chronological age and biological age, along with the difference between those and something called the pace of aging, how epigenetic clocks work and what they may actually be measuring. I'm going to talk about a randomized control trial that used three very simple interventions and tested four of the most common aging clocks. I'm going to also talk about another study that used brain imaging via MRI to study the pace of aging and see what could be gleaned about not just the risk of dementia, but also mortality. I'll discuss the biggest limitation in the field, which is whether changing a clock actually changes.

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