The evidence is convergent. Multiple independent sources reach the same conclusion, the underlying mechanism is well-characterized, and even the field's most cautious voices treat it as worth doing.
The latest generation of epigenetic aging clocks is called Gen X (for generation explainable), they aim to make biological age assessments more understandable by focusing on specific epigenetic signature that can link the effects on systemic biological aging to specific organs (called Organ system Clocks) and/or biomarkers (Called DNAm Proxies), in a manner similar to how conventional studies seek to elicit the mechanism of a drug or intervention.
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Epigenetic clocks are one option to track progress towards longevity escape velocity A test of your DNA Methylation can reveal how fast or slow you are aging.
The most established aging clocks are epigenetic clocks, which use DNA methylation (DNAm) features at "CpGs" to estimate chronological or biological age
One came from Steve Horvath’s development of epigenetic clocks (Horvath, Genome Biology, 2013). By measuring DNA methylation patterns, Horvath showed that biological age could be predicted with remarkable accuracy across many tissues.
which means it doesn't matter if I give you a blood sample or skin sample or a brain sample by looking at that precise location on the genome next to gene X and you look at 300 of them all so then you can actually say exactly what age that Mouse is independent of what part of that Mouse you're given
and looks like we may have found something like that in the field and Horowitz is a pretty young guy yeah younger than me so he's in his forties I think and he's a mathematician he is at UCLA he needed to be a mathematician because to find the clock you can't just read all the methyl groups you actually need to train a computer that uses machine learning to find out which are the ones that change with age and those others that just randomly change
so Corvettes clock is built there were a number of clocks whose latest one is built on a few hundred sites on the genome they're very specific and for reasons that he doesn't understand and I think we are beginning to understand those are the ones that are sensitive to H and that tick along and some tick differently in different tissues but he recently published a universal clock and another group at Harvard published a universal clock for mice which means it doesn't matter if I give you a blood sample or skin sample or a brain sample by looking at that precise location on the genome next to gene X and you look at 300 of them all so then you can actually say exactly what age that Mouse is independent of what part of that Mouse you're given
I would agree with you about the the epigenetic marks like methylation specifically I I'm a little bit more optimistic that you can create the kind of more more broad uh aging clock or aging signature
well the horvath aging clock is what i sometimes call the so-called pan-tissue epigenetic clock and so it is the most accurate molecular measure of age it applies to all cells in the bodies certainly all cells that have dna all tissues all organs it measures age in prenatal samples in children all the way to super centenarians people who are over 110 years old
The advantage of epigenetic clocks is, again, you can get a different measure for different tissues or cells in your body. So, the blood tests, these clinical tests, you'll get one measure, one biological-age measure out of them, but for the epigenetic clocks we can measure your skin's age or, you know, if you had a biopsy, you can measure different organs' age.
So, the current ones are not going to capture more of this multi-dimensionality in aging. And I'm a huge fan of Mike Snyder's work and actually it's kind of influencing some of the work that we're doing now. So, what we're actually trying to do now is to build clocks that are proxying aging in different organ systems.