Accelerating biological age is evident even in the young - latimes

 If scientists want someday to make the old young again, they increasingly recognize they'll need to study young people who seem old. But when a group of researchers recently set out to define what it means to be prematurely old, they discovered that humans age at remarkably different rates, and that we start aging earlier than one might guess.

And for those who feel like they're growing old before their time, the researchers found even worse news: Young adults already showing signs of aging aren't just prematurely old; they seem to be getting older faster than the rest of us.

Led by Duke University's Daniel W. Belsky and Terrie E. Moffitt, the latest research effort explored what aging looks like in the third and fourth decades of life. In a group of 954 study participants all born in Dunedin, New Zealand, in 1972 and '73, researchers had a single, well-studied cohort to test out measures of aging.

As members of the cohort reached 26, and again at ages 32 and 38, the researchers measured their metabolic and immune function and the state of their gums, hearts, lungs, blood vessels, kidneys and livers. They recorded such readily measurable things as BMI and waist-to-hip ratio. And they measured the length of certain telomeres - the shoestring-like ends of DNA fragments that fray with age.

They toted these up, and even in the absence of classical "diseases of aging," researchers could detect heavy signs of aging in some, and age's light touch upon others.

By the tender age of 38, they found, the 952 people tracked since birth ranged in "biological age" from 28 to 61 years old.

Compared with their slower-aging peers, study members who were aging fast showed greater IQ declines from childhood and signs of increased stroke and dementia risk. Their balance was poorer, their fine-motor control was weaker, and, as judged by such measures as grip strength, they were not as strong. - Read More at SCIENCE NOW:
Accelerating biological age evident even in the young

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