Repeated Genetic Test Saliva Shows Your Physical Age

Repeated Genetic Test Saliva Shows Your Physical Age.
A unusual assay that uses a saliva sample to predict a person's age within a five-year sphere could prove useful in solving crimes and improving patient care, University of California, Los Angeles geneticists say. Their check-up focuses on a process called methylation, a chemical modification of one of the four edifice blocks that make up DNA pillarder. "While genes partly image how our body ages, environmental influences also can change our DNA as we age.

Methylation patterns shift as we grow older and bestow to aging-related disease," principal investigator Dr Eric Vilain, a professor of lenient genetics, pediatrics and urology, said in a UCLA news release vitoviga. He and his colleagues analyzed saliva samples from 34 pairs of equivalent male twins, aged 21 to 55, and identified 88 sites on their DNA that strongly linked methylation to age.

They replicated their findings in 31 men and 29 women, old 18 to 70, in the worldwide population. The crew then created a predictive model using two of the three genes with the strongest age-related associate to methylation.

When they entered the data from the saliva samples taken from the twins and people in the other group, the evaluate correctly predicted their ages within five years. "Methylation's relationship with age is so strong that we can home how old someone is by examining just two of the 3 billion building blocks that make up our genome," workroom author Sven Bocklandt, a former UCLA geneticist now at Bioline, said in the university release.

The inspection appears online June 22, 2011 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Physicians might use this exam to evaluate patients' risk of age-related diseases, the researchers suggested.

So "Doctors could forecast your medical risk for a particular disease and customize treatment based on your DNA's factual biological age, as opposed to how old you are," Vilain said. "By eliminating costly and expendable tests, we could target those patients who really need them" bariatric. In addition, protect could test traces of saliva found at a crime scene, such as that on a coffee cup or cigarette, to get an philosophy of a criminal suspect's age.