Aging: The Reality: Biomarkers of Aging: From Primitive Organisms to Humans

TLDR

Biomarkers of aging are sought to quantify physiological age, but challenges include individual variation, overlap with disease, and uncertainty about what constitutes harmful versus benign age‑related changes. The meeting aimed to reach consensus, set a research agenda, and provide policy recommendations. Experts convened to discuss biomarkers of aging. Funding for aging biomarker research remains difficult to secure.

Abstract

Leading biologists and clinicians interested in aging convened to discuss biomarkers of aging. The goals were to come to a consensus, construct an agenda for future research, and make appropriate recommendations to policy makers and the public-at-large. While there was not total agreement on all issues, they addressed a number of questions, among them whether biomarkers can be identified and used to measure the physiological age of any individual within a population, given emerging information about aging and new technological advances. The hurdles to establishing informative biomarkers include the biological variation between individuals that makes generalizations difficult; the overlapping of aging and disease processes; uncertainty regarding benign versus pathogenic age-related changes; the point at which a process begins to do damage to the organism, and, if so, when does it occur; and when to distinguish critical damage from noncritical damage. Finally, and significantly, it is difficult to obtain funding for this research.