A bad day at work could literally age your body by years.
A new study has shown for the first time that stress can make our cells look up to five years older in a single day.
Fortunately, a good night’s sleep offsets most of that damage.
But the study undermines the idea that our biological clocks, as we now understand them, are a perfect way to measure our “true” age.
This new study shows that throughout a day, people’s epigenetic clocks emit different measurements. This measure was previously thought to be stable to daily changes.
Epigenetic clocks observe invisible changes in our DNA that scientists can interpret as a measure of the age of our cells.
While some people measure age in years and others in smile lines, scientists are a little more complicated than that.
They say the most important metric is actually your biological age.
Biological age is determined by unwinding our DNA and reading it for small changes; this is called our epigenetic clock.
Think of these changes like rust on a fingernail or scratches on a CD, just on a microscopic level.
Throughout life, people accumulate changes in their clocks; Until now, scientists thought the epigenetic clock was fairly stable in the short term, according to Art Petronis, a chronoepigeneticist at the University of Toronto, Canada, and Vilnius University, Lithuania. he told PNAS.
But it turns out that these clocks could also be sensitive to changes made throughout the day, according to Dr. Petronis’ new research, which was published in the peer-reviewed journal called aged cell.
In fact, it is so sensitive that one day’s stress can make a person appear to have acquired five years of genetic changes in a 24-hour period.
This is what aging looks like at the DNA level, as stressors cause small tags and changes to be added to your genetic code. Scientists can identify these markers in the blood.
But this doesn’t mean that a particularly stressful day at work will take years off your life.
It means you might want to remove those biological aging tests from your shopping cart, because if a person’s biological age can fluctuate so much over the course of a day, taking a reading at any time may not give you an accurate idea of what so “age”. your cells really are.
This is particularly important since epigenetic clock testing is currently used “with abandon” in laboratories, Trey Ideker, a geneticist at the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the study, told PNAS.
Additionally, multiple companies have emerged around the world offering at-home tests for people curious about cellular aging.
This is the same type of test that Will and Jada Smith talked about using in a 2019 episode of Red Table Talk, and which predicted that UFC president Dana White only had a decade to live.
A company called Tally Health offers one for $249. Another, called Novos, offers an epigenetic test for $349 each.
On the budget end, you can purchase ProHealth’s TruMe Biological Age Test for $99.
There is still “too much” we don’t understand about the science of epigenetics for these tests to be considered accurate, Professor Ideker said.
“This is a study I have been waiting to see for a long time,” said Professor Ideker.
Dr. Petronis and his team reached their conclusions by taking blood samples from a 52-year-old man every three hours, accumulating them into 24 samples for sorting.
They performed 17 different tests on each of the samples, each of which indicated a different epigenetic change.
In 13 of those tests, the researchers observed a large oscillation over a 24-hour period.
Overnight, epigenetic clocks appeared in their youngest phase. Throughout the day, the clocks seemed increasingly older, peaking around noon.
So if you get an epigenetic test around noon, for example, your results could make you look much older than you really are.
We all exist on a somewhat fluctuating scale of epigenetic changes, not a static age, the study suggests. Dr. Petronis said this study needs to be repeated with more people to determine how applicable it is to the average person.
But for now, he hopes it will “open the door” to a big question about epigenetic clocks.
