
In that time, 159 people died – only two of whom had scored a perfect 10.
#Physiological age vs chronological age how to#
More on Fitnessģ0 podcasts that could change your life, from sleep and self-help to running 22 April, 2023 How to get fit and feel good for summer - 30 fitness tips from personal trainers 15 April, 2023 The 10-minute habits that could extend your life – dance, phone a friend and eat seaweed 07 March, 2023 The researchers studied 2,002 adults aged 51 to 80 years old who were followed until they died or the study concluded, 6.3 years later. This test was devised by a Brazilian team in 2012 to predict mortality in middle-aged and elderly people. Meanwhile, the middle-aged can gain a sense of their life expectancy by simply sitting down on the floor and then getting up again without using their hands. I can’t help but feel that with a bit of practice I could improve my score. On my first go I achieved six seconds, putting me in my late fities, but when I tried again I maintained the posture for 14 seconds, getting me closer to someone in their late thirties. With my eyes closed however, my results varied. With my eyes open, I easily achieved the 45-second goal, making my body equivalent to an 18-39-year-old. “The number of hair cells in your inner ear decreases, and even the amount of blood flow you get into your inner ear begins to change.” “As we get older the balance structures in our inner ear start to deteriorate,” says Dr Michael Mosley, who discussed the importance of this challenge on his Radio 4 show Just One Thing. Standing on one leg with your eyes open, and then closed (which makes it more difficult) is a test that becomes increasingly difficult with age. Writer Luisa Metcalfe tests her balance by finding out how long she can stand on one leg with her eyes closed

I tried it and was gratified to see that it bounced back in less than a second, making my hands a youthful under-30. Pinching your skins lets you see how long it takes to return to normal to get an idea of the strength of your body’s collagen, a protein which is weakened by a poor diet, smoking and sun damage. Interested by what else these biological tests show, I tried the other benchmark ageing challenges.

I tried it again, holding the phone closer to my ears, and it came down to 46. On first listen, I couldn’t hear the whine once I hit 48. Well, it turns out my ears are ageing faster than I am. We lose the ability to hear high-pitched sounds as we age, so the test is designed to find out how old your ears are. The video, posted by plays a very high pitched whine which increases in pitch while an age clock counts down from the age of 90. I’m also all too conscious that parties and restaurants are now more challenging for my middle-aged ears so I was keen to try a viral hearing test when it popped up on TikTok. My glasses have been upgraded to varifocals, my knees and feet feel a bit stiff when I first get out of bed and a few greys are appearing in my hair. They include a weakening microbiome DNA damage increased inflammation a build-up of aged “senescent” cells and changes in “epigenetic marks ” that latch on to the DNA in our cells.īut if you want to know how far along your body is in the ageing process, there are methods you can use to put it to the test in the comfort of your own home.Īt the age of 45, my body doesn’t quite feel like it used to. “The hallmarks of ageing follow the same rules: they increase with age, aggravating them worsens health and ameliorating them improves it,” he says.


#Physiological age vs chronological age series#
So, these seemingly surface effects of ageing can give a deeper idea of how old people are in general.”Īgeing itself isn’t just one thing, but a series of chemical processes which are implicated in conditions such as high blood pressure, cataracts, heart disease, arthritis and dementia. “Wrinkles and grey hair are caused by the ageing process, but those same processes underlie the risk of heart disease and cancer. “But the most intuitive and obvious is how old you look,” says biologist Andrew Steele, author of Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older Without Getting Old. Finding out how old we are is clearly big business. In the UK, Cerascreen offers an epigenetic clock saliva test for £175, while the British-Croatian GlycanAge claims its £289 test using glycans, complex sugars that alter the proteins in our body over time, is the “most accurate” snapshot of biological age. These patterns of methyl groups change as we get older, which makes testing for them an accurate predictor of biological age. These “epigenetic clock” tests measure patterns of DNA methylation, which is the number of special molecules called methyl groups on the DNA in the cells.
