Fine-Tuning the Biological Aging Clock - NEO.LIFE

Why do some people live longer, healthier, and more active lives while others their same age struggle with lifelong chronic pain and suffer maladies up to their dying day--which comes much earlier than others? This basic longevity question has been nagging physicians for ages. The importance of lifestyle factors such as diet, exercise, stress, and epigenetic processes like lifestyle and exposure to environmental hazards have been called into account to explain this divergence, and now a team of researchers from Stanford's Cardiovascular Institute Division of Vascular Surgery and the Buck Institute for Research on Aging believes they found the answer. Rather than the biological age, they say a better predictor of health and longevity is a person's inflammation age. Aided by artificial intelligence and machine learning, the researchers have concluded that epigenetic effects of inflammation processes, particularly on the cardiovascular and neurological level, are connected with much of the morbidity and mortality associated with aging.