Posted on 06/07/2018 11:43:05 AM PDT by Red Badger
Companies pledge to tell you your cellular age from a drop of blood. Don’t be so sure
Stay younger, longer. Great idea. But direct-to-consumer test kits that promise to gauge a person’s biological age by analyzing a drop of blood are not worth the $100 or so investment, says oncologist Mary Armanios. The tests measure the length of telomeres, the bits of DNA that cap and protect the ends of chromosomes. But the consumer tests are unreliable and can be misinterpreted, Armanios says.
“These kinds of tests can do harm, suggesting there is something wrong when there isn’t,” says the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine researcher, who uses a clinical test of telomere length to diagnose and treat people with certain rare disorders. Oncologist Mary Armanios Johns Hopkins Medicine
These kinds of tests can do harm, suggesting there is something wrong when there isn’t.
— Mary Armanios
Armanios gets calls from people who panic when they get their results from consumer tests. One man in his 40s was told his telomeres were those of an 80-year-old. He sold his house and quit work to make the most of the short time he was convinced he had left. Worse, she says, because he was under the misguided impression that surgeries shorten telomeres, he had decided to delay removal of a precancerous skin spot.
Armanios trained in the lab of Carol Greider, who shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for discovering telomerase, the enzyme that controls telomere lengthening (SN: 10/24/09, p. 14). Today Armanios is clinical director of the telomere center at Johns Hopkins.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencenews.org ...
UST A NUMBER Several companies offer at-home test kits for telomere length. Send in a blood sample and, these companies claim, they’ll tell you if you are older or younger than you think. Test kits also come with advice for maintaining the ends of your chromosomes.
Anna Hoychuk/shutterstock
Caveat emptor..................
Eat healthy, exercise some, play often, have sex, and sleep well.
Eat
Pray
Love
Fish
Repeat...................
We both make solid points.
It’s a play on the movie title.............”Eat Pray Love”
Chick movie?
To The MAX....................
Yeah, right. And I bet I’m not 79% Scottish, 14% English, 4% Iberian, and 3% Greek/Other either, am I?
Telomeres are the ‘end caps’ of your DNA. The longer they are, supposedly the longer you would live, barring other factors like disease and accidents, war and murder...........
Something tells me sending my DNA somewhere is a bad idea.
volcano, asteroid, ice age...
Screw that! I hate the sight of blood.
I'll just get a new cell phone.
Cheaper just to have a look at your parents.
Some of the other DNA tests can be quite useful in elucidating metabolism, guiding selection of prescription drugs to match what will work for you, for example.
What could possibly go wrong?
Lovely..
I believe it is the supplement Ashwagandah that is reported to lengthen telomeres.
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