< Scientists can tell how fast you're aging. Now, the trick is to slow it down

LEILA FADEL, HOST:

The concept of average life expectancy is not new, but scientists can now actually estimate your personal rate of aging to gauge whether you're aging more quickly or slowly than your peers. Today, NPR is starting a new project, How to Thrive as You Age. And Allison Aubrey kicks it off with a visit to a longevity lab.

DOUGLAS VAUGHAN: Are you ready for this?

ALLISON AUBREY, BYLINE: I am not sure. Should I be doing this?

VAUGHAN: I think you should. I think you'll find it interesting and maybe insightful for what your future might be about.

FADEL: Oh, my gosh. What are you doing there, Allison? Allison is joining us now.

(LAUGHTER)

FADEL: And you sound kind of hesitant. What is happening?

AUBREY: Good morning, Leila. Well, we all age at different rates. And Dr. Doug Vaughan, who you just heard there, leads the Human Longevity Lab at Northwestern University in Chicago, where they can measure your rate of aging. Are you a super-ager, more likely to live to 100 or beyond, an average ager or is your aging accelerated? Now, to figure this out, they put you through a whole bunch of tests. One of them is called the grim age test.

FADEL: OK, well, that doesn't sound very good. Can they call it something else?

(LAUGHTER)

AUBREY: It actually gives you a prediction or indicator of your biological age. So we all know our chronological age. That's the date on your birth certificate. But our biological age is a gauge of how well your cells, your DNA are holding up, how well your muscles and cardiovascular system are holding up.

FADEL: OK, so now I understand why you're nervous. If you get bad news, you're aging fast...

AUBREY: Right.

FADEL: ...Is there anything you can do? And are you aging? What is your - are you a super-ager?

AUBREY: (Laughter) Well, we'll find out. I mean, some of this is definitely beyond our control, right? But let me give you an example of information that can be helpful. One of the tests I did was in a device called a BodPod. It's a capsule. It looks like a little marine submersible that you got to climb into. And I started to feel claustrophobic the moment the medical assistant, Jessica Garcia (ph), opened the door.

(SOUNDBITE OF DOOR SQUEAKING)

JESSICA GARCIA: Before you jump in, let me point out that blue button to the side there. That stops the test if you wish to for whatever reason.

AUBREY: OK.

GARCIA: OK?

VAUGHAN: You see the Titanic, hit that button.

GARCIA: Yeah (laughter).

AUBREY: OK. All right.

So over the course of a few minutes, the BodPod measures your body composition, gives you a ratio of body fat to lean mass, including muscle. And the reason it's helpful to know about muscle mass is that as we age, we all start to lose muscle, as early as age 30. It happens at different rates, so maintaining strength is really key. It's a key way to prevent the risk of falls, which is the top cause of death from injury for older people. And so this test tells you how you stack up.

FADEL: OK. So once you go into the BodPod and you get all this information, what do you do with that information?

AUBREY: Well, in the case of, say, what you learn in the BodPod, if you need to build muscle, you can do resistance training. That is the key thing. You can make some changes to your diet. And this is actually the big goal of the Longevity Lab. The idea is that if they gather this baseline data on body composition - strength, cardiovascular function, biological age - on a whole bunch of people, then they can run tests, clinical studies to figure out which things may slow down aging.

VAUGHAN: It's a healthspan prolongation lab. We want to push back the onset of aging-related disease. That's our fundamental goal.

AUBREY: And Dr. Vaughan and a lot of other researchers in this space are optimistic that by targeting the basic biology of aging, they can eventually figure out how to prevent or really delay some of the common diseases that accelerate as we age, diabetes, heart disease and many more.

FADEL: OK, so how do they plan to do that?

AUBREY: Well, they're recruiting a mix of people of different ages, ethnic backgrounds, incomes, people who live in low-income neighborhoods. They'll get baseline measurements to gauge their rate of aging using these biomarkers and these tests, then they will test interventions that have the potential to slow it down. One population Dr. Vaughan plans to study are people with chronic HIV, who tend to age at an accelerated pace, and he wants to test a bunch of different things.

VAUGHAN: It might be weight training, it might be intermittent fasting, it might be dietary manipulations. It might be drugs that are available now that might have anti-aging effects like Metformin or even Ozempic. But we want to see if we can't actually slow down the pace of aging.

AUBREY: Now, in recent years, life expectancy has dipped in the U.S., but not for everyone, Leila. Life expectancy is very much influenced by where we live. The Longevity Lab is in an upscale neighborhood near fine dining, gyms, expensive apartments. People in this high-income neighborhood can expect to live a much longer life compared to people who live just a few miles away.

VAUGHAN: I'm worried about the poor soul in South Chicago who's got a life expectancy of 55 compared to 92 in the neighborhood that we're standing in right now.

FADEL: Allison, that's more than a 30-year difference just based on where you live.

AUBREY: Yeah, it's stunning. And a lot of factors play into this. I mean, poverty, housing, crime, stress, all of these can shorten lifespan and lead to diseases earlier in life. And these societal issues are very challenging to address. But Dr. Vaughan says the goal of researchers is to figure out ways to intervene early.

VAUGHAN: We know that aging is the most important risk factor for every disease that we deal with in adult human beings. And if we could slow down the pace of aging just a little bit, we can give people a few more healthy years, a few more years to enjoy their life, push back the onset of the heart disease or cancer or whatever it might be. And that's for everybody. That's not for the 1%.

FADEL: OK, so I think my first question is now my last question. What did you learn personally, Allison, at the Longevity Lab?

AUBREY: Well, I learned I need to be focused on building muscle, on building strength. And stress is something I need to work on, too, that may be working against longevity.

VAUGHAN: We have the tools now to be able to answer that question - does stress drive an acceleration in your biological age? Maybe that's part of the reason for the discrepancy in life expectancy in different neighborhoods of Chicago, different kinds of stresses. We could bring people in and we could measure their biological age at baseline and then have them do a de-stressing protocol - meditation, yoga - as a way to slow aging. But let's do the measures.

AUBREY: Eventually, Dr. Vaughan says, with all of the research going on into healthy aging, he's optimistic that there will be breakthroughs to kind of move us towards preventing or delaying the onset of many age-related diseases.

FADEL: OK. Well, I'm looking forward to more of your reporting. NPR's Allison Aubrey. Thanks, Allison.

AUBREY: Thank you, Leila.

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