How fast are you aging, really? With Dr. Terrie Moffitt

Measuring your Biological Age has been extremely popularized because of how highly correlated it is to almost every chronic disease and death. However, the Biological Age of a person is limited in the sense that it is a “historical-based” age, meaning it only captures how quickly you’ve been aging since your inception up until the present moment.

Have you ever wondered how quickly you’re aging at this very second? We need a metric that can tell us if we are currently aging in the right direction or the wrong direction. Because of Dr. Terrie Moffitt and other researchers at Duke, Columbia University, and the University of Otago there is now a new metric available that captures just that called the “DunedinPACE”. 

I’ve been lucky enough to know Dr. Terrie Moffitt through my company, TruDiagnostic, as we have the exclusive license to the DunedinPACE in all verticals. Dr. Moffitt’s uplifting attitude and outlook of being “cautiously optimistic” when working with the Dunedin cohort and other researchers using the DunedinPACE makes for a fun and interesting conversation. 

In my first ever episode of the Everything Epigenetics podcast, Dr. Terrie Moffit speaks with me about the Dunedin cohort and how she and her team developed the DunedinPACE tool. Building the database took the international team over five decades (and counting), while they tracked biological changes in the bodies of 1037 New Zealanders who are members of the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development study, a project that began with their birth in 1972. When initially asking the National Institute of Aging, the peer reviewers thought that focusing on a 30 age cohort was incorrect. They thought there would be no variation and if there was it would be insignificant. Dr. Terrie Moffitt has recently traveled back to Dunedin, New Zealand with her team to collect the fifth round of data on the cohort participants, as they are now 52 years-old. 

In this podcast you’ll hear:

• A discussion of the Dunedin cohort and the significance of its retention rate
• The difference between DunedinPoAm and DunedinPACE 
• How you can measure your pace of aging using the DunedinPACE
• The importance of the relationship between an increased DunedinPACE and disease 
• How Biological Age Clocks differ from the DunedinPACE
• The application of DunedinPACE in clinical trials looking at anti-aging therapeutics, personal use, and surgical candidates for outcomes
• Dr. Moffitt’s point of view about being “cautiously optimistic” 
• The type of sample collection and retest window required for DunedinPACE
• The difficulty with obtaining methylation data from both blood and saliva samples
• A quick overview of the CALERIE trial 
• What factors accelerate and decelerate the DunedinPACE

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Thank you for joining us at the Everything Epigenetics Podcast and remember you have control over your Epigenetics, so tune in next time to learn more about how to harness this knowledge for your benefit.