Duke psychologists Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi began working with a long-term study of 1,000 people in New Zealand to get a better perspective on how childhood factors may have led to adolescent behaviors, such as risk-taking.
But after following all the children born in Dunedin, New Zealand, in 1972 and 鈥73 for several decades, the married researchers鈥 questions began to shift: How were the childhood differences reflected in middle age health, and how is it, as the group enters its 50s, that they all seem to be aging at different rates?
Biologically, we all age. Joints get stiffer, arteries get thinner and eyes and ears just don鈥檛 gather information they way they used to.
Based on their unparalleled collection of health data on these people, Moffitt and Caspi have come up with a 鈥減ace of aging鈥 score that converts all those health variables into a single measure that reflects whether a person is biologically aging one year for every year on the calendar, or whether they鈥檙e aging slower or faster.
That scoring system is now being converted into a measure based on epigenetic markers, placemarks on the genes that reflect their life experiences.
In this video, Caspi and Moffitt explain their work and what it has taught them, and introduce just a bit about their new test, which has been licensed to a company called TruDiagnostics.