Measuring your aging rate

May 21, 2023

Welcome to Issue 48 of Science Says! Our weekly newsletter where you’ll learn the latest healthy aging and C15:0 research news that our team of doctors, scientists, and experts are most excited about—without having to go search for it.

Eric and Steph
Co-Founders, Doctors, Nerds

What Dr. Stephanie Venn-Watson, our co-founder and author of The Longevity Nutrient and over 80 peer-reviewed scientific publications, is reading.

Healthy Aging

Slow down, you move too fast

The ability to reverse aging is no longer science fiction. Sounds too good to be true? In this series, we are talking about the latest peer-reviewed science on how slowing, and even reversing aging is becoming a reality.

This week, let’s talk about how aging rates are measured – and how these measurements can be used to assess how well anti-aging compounds are actually reversing aging.

How exactly does one measure aging rates?

While our chronological aging rate is simply measured in years, our biological aging rate can be measured using a variety of different biomarkers. Moskalev and and Butler describe what an ideal aging rate biomarker should do. Simply, a good biomarker of aging should:

Change with age
Anticipate the early stages of an age-related disease
Be affordable, not require a serious intervention, and not be a painful test

While there has been a lot of excitement around measuring fancy things like telomere length and DNA methylation, there are a handful of tests that our doctors already use to routinely assess our health – and can also serve as aging biomarkers. Some of these less sexy but longer-lasting aging rate biomarkers include declining hemoglobin, declining platelets, and declining lymphocytes. Let’s dive a little deeper into hemoglobin.

Great. What is hemoglobin?

Hemoglobin is a protein in our red blood cells, and it plays the oh-so-important role of carrying oxygen from our lungs to our tissues.

As we age, our cells become more fragile – including our red blood cells. The result? Our red blood cells die prematurely, and our hemoglobin levels decline.

Hemoglobin tells our longevity fortune (or fate).

Mamoshina et al. led a large study involving blood test records from 55,751 people from a diverse set of countries to identify which routine blood tests best predicted advancing age as well as mortality. In this study on human hematological aging clocks, they found that hemoglobin declined with age. Further, the more a person’s hemoglobin declined with age (aka the faster their aging rate), the more likely that person was to have a shorter lifespan.

Fun fact:

As published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we discovered that dolphins and humans share the same measurements of aging rates, including declining hemoglobin. 🐬

What effect does declining hemoglobin have on my long-term health?

When hemoglobin drops below 13 g/dl, a person has anemia. Anemia is a common aging-associated condition, affecting 20% to 76% of older people globally. Salis et al. recently showed that people with “anemia of aging” are more likely to have aging-related diseases. This supports that declining hemoglobin and anemia can be powerful biomarkers of whole-body biological aging.

In summary, hemoglobin meets the criteria of a good biomarker of biological aging: it changes with age, anticipates the early stages of an age-related disease (aka anemia of aging), and is readily available and affordable.

Thus, while telomere length and DNA methylation may be the hot biomarkers of aging that longevity scientists are dating, our tried and true routine blood tests, such as hemoglobin levels, may be the aging rate biomarkers that we marry.

Evidence that C15:0 slows aging rates: Strengthened red blood cells and raised hemoglobin levels

Once we have a good biomarker of biological aging, we can use these biomarkers to evaluate how well anti-aging molecules are slowing aging rates.

In this series, we have covered how C15:0 targets key hallmarks of aging (aka cellular senescence, mitochondrial dysfunction, impaired cellular signaling, and inflammaging), as well as core components of the human longevity pathway (aka AMPK and mTOR).

Importantly, these age-reversing benefits are translating to slower aging rates, as evidenced by C15:0’s ability to restore red blood cell counts and hemoglobin to normal levels. Specifically:

C15:0 supplementation restores healthy hemoglobin and red blood cell levels. Daily C15:0 supplementation has been shown to effectively raise hemoglobin and red blood cells to normal levels within 3 months.
C15:0 reverses aging rates in dolphins. When older Navy dolphins with aging-related anemia and low hemoglobin were provided a fish-based diet higher in C15:0, their C15:0 levels increased, and both their red blood cell count and hemoglobin levels returned to normal.
People with higher C15:0 have healthier red blood cells and less oxidative stress. Soboleva et al. showed that people with higher C15:0 levels had better red blood cell health, as well as less damaging oxidative products in their plasma.

The ability for C15:0 to support cellular health – including influencing clinically relevant biomarkers indicative of slowed aging rates – is another check in the box for C15:0 as a leading longevity compound. The evidence keeps building…

Have a wonderful week, everyone!