Joy Kong discusses why inflammation matters more than epigenetic age tests for slowing aging. Epigenetic tests predict your chronological age accurately but offer few ways to change the result. Inflammation is different: we know how to reduce it, and one study found therapeutic plasma exchange cut biological age by about 3 years.
The epigenetic tests for as much as they are very, very accurate at predicting chronological age, they're not quite yet intervenable or we know very little about how to intervene. There's a few studies now looking at different modalities of intervention and see, for example, we published the therapeutic plasma exchange paper and we talked about showing that there's a reduction of about three years of biological age and that is using epigenetics. If you're measuring before and after in the same individuals, you get better accuracy than if you're measuring in different individuals of the same age. On the other hand, there are other tests like inflammation that you know how to intervene, we know how to target inflammation. And so those to me are more telling, are more important and guide you on how, where to go.
Inflammation is very much tied in with aging, right? You reduce inflammation theoretically, maybe you can reduce.
It is very clear. I think it's a consensus in the scientific literature that inflammation is at the center of aging hallmarks is one key predictor of most if not all of the diseases of aging.
