Epigenetic age oscillates during the day
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
But that's me. Mind sharing your reasons? Of course could be obscured as much as you need.
We walk members through our data usage policies in person and ask questions to ensure we understand both their health and privacy concerns. Without long-term trustworthiness on our part, we won't get the longitudinal data that we need to ensure that we continue building the best in class predictive models.
There are other reasons, but that's the biggest one.
So you're a high-tech epidemiology company providing disease risk assessments based on your predictive models. These predictive models you say are using multiple data planes to evaluate temporal effects across diverse biology.
My questiosn are, are data planes (multi-omics) the same as just data sources. Naturally conducting epidemiology necessitates taking in data from many sources, where does the term multi-omics come into play here? Presumably some of your data sources are genetics so I could see the "omics" part coming from that field, but it's an interesting term and I'd like to know what you mean by it?
Things like posture, white-coat syndrome, having to pee, cuff placement, cuff size, arm position, muscularity, arm diameter, time sitting, and many other variables have a massive influence on blood pressure.
BP is kind of like weight - it should be taken at regular intervals during the day, at the same times, and averaged out over time to look at trends. "Snapshot" BP readings are most useful for things like hypertensive crisis, not ongoing BP management.
Unfortunately, we see a lot of people put on BP meds where other interventions may be more appropriate based on bad BP measurements.
I think there are a lot of things in healthcare like this, where our models are too simplistic and result in flawed understanding and consequently ineffective treatments.
This is well known re thyroid medication as well. Also re weight, progesterone, a bunch of things.
I'm glad you've had good experiences and relationships with what sound like quality healthcare professionals.
Others have had different experiences.
>It's the first thing you learn when you google "how to take bp".
The populations that I frequently deal with are not in a life/financial/cognitive place where this is a thing they would think of doing, or be capable of doing.
Take a look at this [1] about over treatment of mild hypertension. It's not a new problem, and potentially affects millions [2].
There can be enormous pressure on physicians to treat certain conditions from a population-health standpoint with medications if they fit certain clinical criteria.
The recent (2017) change in standards for hypertension [3] have been controversial. It put millions of people into the category of hypertension that weren't previously. Coupled with certain clinical criteria that recommend medication prescription even for mild hypertension, it's concerning that there may be an overprescription issue.
Many busy clinics don't have time to have a patient sit for the recommended 5 minutes of rest before taking BP (though I've seen this improving). Many medical assistants are poorly trained in BP measurement, and are overworked - I've seen many cases where a harried MA will do things like sit a patient down, put a cuff on them over-the-sleeve, as the patient slouches in a chair, with the arm in an incorrect position, a poorly fitted cuff, and just write down the number the machine spits out.
Of course, a good PCP will double check this and look for a trend. Not all PCP's are good and go to this effort.
(I am not a physician, I'm a tech nerd with a clinical background, but I've worked in healthcare for decades)
I've also experienced it personally. I went to the doc once about ten years ago for a wellness check. Based on the in-office BP reading and labs, the NP prescribed me five different medications, including BP meds, statins and others.
I decided to focus on lifestyle changes instead and that's worked well for me, but that's not an option for everyone.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZCuJheVJA0
[2] https://www.umassmed.edu/news/news-archives/2014/11/umms-fam...
[3] https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/reading-the-new-...
My entire life I’ve had perfect blood pressure, but suddenly this lab thinks I have hypertension. After 3-4 visits and checking my own BP during the day, I realized that my blood pressure is just higher in the morning - I never set appointments in the morning previously because I lived too far from a lab to make morning appointments convenient.
Everyone goes through huge peaks and troughs with BP - at the gym, sleeping, etc... will have massive changes in BP.
There are certain conditions where "instant" BP can become a problem, both high and low. Orthostatic hypotension, for example, is a condition where you can get dizzy or black out from changing position too quickly.
There's also a condition known as labile hypertension that can cause random high spikes in BP.
Since I have the cuff I check it every so often to make sure it's still fine and it is, but the moment I get in a drs. office boom it spikes. This is even true when I'm there for someone else like my son or my wife. I can feel that my blood pressure is high.
I have absolutely no explanation for why except that I had a major surgery when I was 5 and there must be some suppressed trauma from that that comes out physically when I'm in a doctor's office.
[0] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcvm.2019.00040...
[1] https://www.cnet.com/health/medical/i-have-high-hopes-for-th...
It sounds like the most immediate takeaway is that anyone analyzing this stuff needs to control for when measure individuals.
Source? Because I know people working on it as a target measure at a national lab in India as well as at Pfizer (in America) and Novartis (in Switzerland).
That’s not how science works.
Epigenetic age prediction is an area of active research for general diagnostic and treatment vectors [1]. There are peer-reviewed studies on the stuff. You claimed “really a marketing tool for bespoke medicine”. That appears to be false.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2022.11.001
Epigenetic alterations such as DNA methylation are only one hallmark of aging, and not the most useful one in most cases. Interventions to reduce those epigenetic alternations have generally not proven effective in extending lifespans or improving health outcomes.
Thank you. And I totally agree. It reminds me of telomere craze in the early noughties.
It not being a panacea, however, is different from it being useless. Marking it as pure marketing makes it sound like it's cosmetics. It's not. The first research on chronological age prediction dates from 2011; we're still in the basic research phase. (Which the article mentioned is. It's not marketing any treatment.) To the degree it's being turned into a scam it's in supplements, not bespoke medicine.
They said it is “really a marketing for bespoke medicine.” That implies only (or mostly) useful to bespoke medicine as a marketing tool. Demonstrating any significant other utility falsifies that statement.
If you were born 50 years ago today, you're 50 years old. Age is a concrete, mathematical thing. That your cells appear to be younger or older to your actual (chronological) age is irrelevant. You don't get to say your "real age" is 45 because your cells are slightly better than they "should be."
“I am 50 years old” is a statement of fact like you refer.
“Real age” is essentially a term of art used to describe your relative health - a single number to indicate the cumulative impact of your lifestyle, genes, etc.
No one says “I have a real age of 50” to the question “how old are you?”
The purported use of an epigenetic clock in humans is that it predicts either aging effects of remaining life span in some sense; neither of these have been proven to be biologically true because in the first we don't necessarily have the definition of aging, and certainly don't have it down to a single axis, at best it is understood along many different dimensions, many of which are not captured by epigenetic measures.
And second sense, predicting remaining life span, is completely unproven. Even more speculative is whether measures which change a person's epigenetic age will result in changes in remaining lifespan.
There's a chance that epigenetic age becomes useful for something, but it's just a chance. It's not established science.
Additionally, there are a lot of biotech/junk studies claiming some new intervention reduces/reverses biologic age using these epigenetic clocks as evidence. Making me very wary of the whole thing, though unfairly to those actually doing sound studies I admit.
[1] https://clinicalepigeneticsjournal.biomedcentral.com/article...
And the study you are citing (8 to 12 year errors) - seems to report maximum errors, not averages. These might be caused by poor quality samples, so it's unfair to report it like that. Also the publication under discussion (epigenetic age oscillates) would answer where the fluctuations observed by the article you linked to come from - part of them are of course technical due to measurement error, but part of them are influenced by differences in sample collection times.
I also share your skepticism about intervention research and using "biological clocks" to measure how healthy you are. Curiously chronological clocks seem to not be easily affected by interventions. And I would guess this is why most people doing epigenetic aging for sport use biological clocks (like DunedinPACE). But then the question - if you are younger according to "biological age", but we still can measure your true chronological age accurately - are you actually younger in a meaningful sense.
Body temperature measurements from outside the body are impacted by changes in blood flow, which will happen when you stand up.
Your core body temperature isn't fluctuating, the temperature at the measurement point is changing slightly because you've changed your blood flow.
We're constantly losing heat from our bodies to the environment. You could probably get similar measurements if you heavily insulated the entire area around the thermometer and let measurements stabilized.
In other words: Don't read too much into this experiment.
How do I know? Because I got so annoyed at the IR thermometers that I recently got myself one of those USB-C thermal cameras (UTi721M, specifically). It's like a 256x192 array of IR thermometers, measuring continuously, so you actually see what's going on. Lots of interesting things you can learn that way, for example that cheeks, chin and nose can easily be 1-2℃ cooler than the forehead, or that the neck/throat shows about the same temperature that the forehead, but seems more stable. And, it's much faster to take temp of everyone at home in one go. And then you also can learn a lot about your own environment, too. I highly recommend this to anyone.
That said, I found in-ear IR most reliable, and use it as a baseline for health checkups. You do however need to watch out for insertion - if you put the head in the ear too fast and measure immediately, you can get a result that's a degree or two centigrade above correct, which I imagine is because of momentary friction heating.