By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
A new blood test that measures the length of a person’s telomeres, which are structures on the tips of our chromosomes that reveal how quickly a person is aging, may soon be used by the general public to determine how long they will live.
The Independent is reporting that the controversial new test, which is expected to on sale in the UK later this year, will be able to tell if a person’s “biological age” – as measured by the length of their telomeres – is older or young than their actual chronological age, thus predicting how long they will live.
Even though medical researchers believe that telomere testing will become widespread within the next decade, the test raises serious ethical questions about how people will react to news that their lifespan appears to be shorter – or longer – than they imagined. Will insurance companies gauge whether or not to insure someone depending on the results of this test? How might unscrupulous organizations trying to peddle phony anti-aging remedies to the public use this information?
Many questions are as yet unanswered, but there is a growing body of scientific opinion that says testing the length of a person’s telomeres could provide vital insights into the risk of dying prematurely from a range of age-related disorders, from cardiovascular disease to Alzheimer’s and cancer.
“We know that people who are born with shorter telomeres than normal also have a shorter lifespan. We know that shorter telomeres can cause a shorter lifespan,” Maria Blasco of the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre in Madrid, who is the inventor of the new commercial telomere test, told The Independent. “But we don’t know whether longer telomeres are going to give you a longer lifespan. That’s not really known in humans,” she added.
“What is new about this test is that it is very precise. We can detect very small differences in telomere length and it is a very simple and fast technique where many samples can be analyzed at the same time. Most importantly, we are able to determine the presence of dangerous telomeres – those that are very short.”
Dr Blasco’s company, Life Length, is already in talks with medical diagnostic companies across Europe to market the test and collect blood samples for analysis in Spain.
Although Life Length is not the only company selling telomere tests, it’s the only one who is preparing to sell their test over-the-counter, and the only one with a test considered accurate enough for practical use.
“This test devised by Blasco is so accurate that it is likely to provide more useful information than some of the other tests out there right now,” said Professor Jerry Shay of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centre in Dallas, a scientific consultant for Life Length.
“Everyone talks about the chronological age, but there is also a biological age, and telomere length is actually a pretty good representation of your biological age. Telomeres are important – there is no question of that,” he said.
Why would people want to take this test? “I think people are just basically curious about their own mortality,” Dr. Shay said. “If you ask people what they worry about, most people would say they are worried about dying.”
He added: “People might say ‘If I know I’m going to die in 10 years I’ll spend all my money now’, or ‘If I’m going to live for 40 more years I’ll be more conservative in my lifestyle’. The worrying thing is that if this information ever got to a point where it is believable, insurance companies would start requiring it in terms of insuring people. . . . If you smoke or you’re obese your insurance rates are higher, and if you have short telomeres your insurance rates might be higher too.”
Telomere research is not new and is considered to be one of the most exciting areas in biomedical science. In fact, last year the Nobel Prize in medicine was shared between three scientists who are pioneers in the field.
To date, telomere research has provided remarkable clues about aging to scientists.
For instance, in 2003, scientists studied 20-year-old blood samples from 143 people and found show that telomere length is good indicator of whether someone is likely to live for 15 years or more once they reach 60 years of age.
In 2004, researchers found that women living with the stress of a sick child had shorter telomeres which other research found that meditation or other forms of stress reduction may lengthen telomeres.
A 2007 study of men in Scotland found that those with the longest telomeres were half as likely to develop heart disease than those with shorter telomeres.
However, as of this time, scientists cannot determine the exact length of a person’s life depending on the length of their telomeres, and can only say if someone will have a longer or a shorter lifespan than what their biological age would predict.
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