A new contest pits competitors against each other in a race to biological youth
A new contest pits competitors against each other in a race to biological youth
一场让参赛者竞相角逐“生物学年轻化”的新竞赛
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY This week, I officially signed up for an unusual competition. One that rewards competitors for getting younger. I recently turned 40, and I don’t need reminding that both time and my chronological age only tick forward. But this game is focused on competitors’ biological ages—figures that are meant to provide a better way to measure the age-related health of our organs and bodies. 执行摘要 本周，我正式报名参加了一场不同寻常的比赛。这场比赛奖励那些让自己“变年轻”的参赛者。我最近刚满 40 岁，无需提醒我也知道，时间和我的生理年龄只会不断向前推进。但这场比赛关注的是参赛者的“生物学年龄”——这些数据旨在提供一种更好的方式，来衡量我们器官和身体与年龄相关的健康状况。
Over a six-month period, around 500 of us will try to reverse our biological age as measured in a bunch of different ways. There’s even a leaderboard! The winners will include the person who shows the greatest difference between their chronological and biological age, as well as the person who manages to reverse their biological age the most. 在六个月的时间里，我们大约 500 名参赛者将尝试通过多种不同的方式来逆转我们的生物学年龄。比赛甚至还有一个排行榜！获胜者将包括生理年龄与生物学年龄差距最大的人，以及成功逆转生物学年龄幅度最大的人。
The competition is the brainchild of the neuroscientist and physician Christin Glorioso, who is also founder and CEO of NeuroAge Therapeutics. The company offers tools to track brain health and aging and is running a trial to find out if biological brain age can predict the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. 这场比赛是由神经科学家兼医生 Christin Glorioso 发起的，她同时也是 NeuroAge Therapeutics 的创始人和首席执行官。该公司提供追踪大脑健康和衰老的工具，目前正在进行一项试验，旨在探究生物学大脑年龄是否能预测阿尔茨海默病的发生。
Glorioso says she has several goals for the Younger contest. The first, she tells me, is to “explain to the world what aging clocks are.” Regular Checkup readers will be familiar with these tools, but for the uninitiated, they are basically designed to measure biological age. Many measure chemical signatures that form a layer on top of our DNA and seem to change with age. But others might involve looking at proteins or lipids in blood. Some are designed to measure functional health, while others predict when a person will die. Glorioso 表示，她举办这场“年轻化”竞赛有几个目标。她告诉我，第一个目标是“向世界解释什么是衰老时钟”。经常阅读《Checkup》的读者对这些工具应该很熟悉，但对于外行来说，它们本质上是用来测量生物学年龄的。许多时钟通过测量形成于 DNA 之上的化学特征来工作，这些特征似乎会随年龄增长而改变。但其他时钟可能涉及观察血液中的蛋白质或脂质。有些旨在衡量功能性健康，而另一些则用于预测一个人的死亡时间。
There are more than a hundred clocks out there, and they probably each capture a specific aspect of the biological process of aging. These clocks are proving very useful for scientists, who use them to study aging and development in humans and many other species. But using them to estimate the biological age of an individual person is more controversial. They’re just not good enough for that yet. Part of the problem is that we don’t really understand what each clock is capturing. 目前市面上有一百多种衰老时钟，它们可能各自捕捉到了生物衰老过程中的特定方面。这些时钟对科学家非常有用，他们利用这些工具研究人类及许多其他物种的衰老和发育。但用它们来评估个人的生物学年龄则更具争议性。目前，它们还不足以胜任这项工作。部分问题在于，我们并不真正了解每个时钟具体捕捉到了什么。
Glorioso hopes that data collected through the Younger contest might help answer that question. She’s hoping to generate “the world’s most comprehensive clock dataset.” Some longevity clinics try to get around the limits of biological age testing by using multiple clocks. That’s this competition’s approach too. Glorioso 希望通过这场竞赛收集的数据能有助于回答这个问题。她希望能生成“世界上最全面的时钟数据集”。一些长寿诊所试图通过使用多种时钟来规避生物学年龄测试的局限性。这也是本次比赛所采取的方法。
As a standard competitor, I’ll be sending a blood spot sample to TruDiagnostic, a company that measures epigenetic chemical groups on DNA and offers to reveal an overall biological age as well as a person’s pace of aging and the biological ages of each of 11 organ systems, including the heart and brain. I’ll get a brain age score from NeuroAge once I complete the cognitive tasks on offer. I’ll also submit some physical measures like grip strength. And I’ll upload a series of selfies to an app developed by a team at Harvard that promises to tell me my face age. That’s exactly what it sounds like—an estimate of how old my face looks. 作为一名普通参赛者，我将向 TruDiagnostic 公司寄送一份血斑样本。该公司通过测量 DNA 上的表观遗传化学基团，提供包括整体生物学年龄、衰老速度以及包括心脏和大脑在内的 11 个器官系统的生物学年龄评估。完成提供的认知任务后，我将获得 NeuroAge 的大脑年龄评分。我还将提交一些身体指标，如握力。此外，我还会将一系列自拍照上传到哈佛大学团队开发的一款应用程序上，该程序承诺能告诉我我的“面部年龄”。顾名思义，这就是对我的脸看起来有多大年纪的评估。
I’m intrigued to see my scores, even though I know I shouldn’t put too much stock in them. The first time I took a test, four years ago, the company I used gave me a biological age that matched my chronological age, which was a little disappointing and, if I’m honest, a bit underwhelming. A year later, the same company told me I had a young heart but a relatively old brain, liver, and hormonal system. My lifestyle hasn’t changed much since then. Will the years have made much difference? 我很想看看我的分数，尽管我知道我不应该太当真。四年前我第一次参加测试时，那家公司给出的生物学年龄与我的生理年龄一致，这让我有点失望，老实说，还有点扫兴。一年后，同一家公司告诉我，我的心脏很年轻，但大脑、肝脏和荷尔蒙系统相对较老。从那时起，我的生活方式并没有太大改变。这些年过去，会有什么不同吗？
(Ultra competitors—who pay $4,499 rather than the $999 cost of regular entry—are also offered a range of other blood tests and clocks, as well as MRI and DEXA scans. I’ve got complimentary press access to the standard package.) （“超级参赛者”——支付 4,499 美元而非普通参赛费 999 美元——还将获得一系列其他血液测试和时钟检测，以及 MRI 和 DEXA 扫描。我获得了标准套餐的免费媒体访问权限。）
Glorioso is also hoping to gather information about the effects of some purported longevity approaches. During the competition, some participants will be offered red-light masks, access to a sauna, or other low-risk offerings that partner companies who are sponsoring the event to varying degrees might want to collect data on. “A lot of these companies just can’t afford to run [clinical] trials,” says Glorioso. She also sees the event as a public health initiative. Glorioso 还希望收集有关某些所谓长寿方法效果的信息。在比赛期间，一些参赛者将获得红光面膜、桑拿体验或其他低风险产品，这些产品由不同程度赞助本次活动的合作公司提供，他们可能希望借此收集数据。“许多这样的公司根本负担不起（临床）试验的费用，”Glorioso 说。她还将此次活动视为一项公共卫生倡议。
A couple of years ago, David Sinclair, who studies aging at Harvard Medical School, and his colleagues estimated that if we could slow down aging in the general population and increase life expectancy by one year, it would save the US economy $38 trillion. 几年前，哈佛医学院研究衰老的 David Sinclair 及其同事估计，如果我们能减缓普通人群的衰老速度并将预期寿命延长一年，将为美国经济节省 38 万亿美元。
The event officially kicks off in January, but around 120 people have already signed up, says Glorioso. Ultimately, she expects 500 participants. Each person’s six-month run starts as soon as they take their baseline measurements, whenever that may be. A handful of people have already started. “I think the majority of people are going to want to sign up after the holidays,” says Glorioso. “They’re not going to want to be trying to win an aging contest over Christmas and Hanukkah.” Glorioso 表示，活动将于 1 月正式启动，但目前已有约 120 人报名。她最终预计会有 500 名参赛者。每个人的六个月赛程从他们进行基线测量时开始，无论那是在什么时候。已经有少数人开始了。“我认为大多数人会想在假期结束后报名，”Glorioso 说，“他们可不想在圣诞节和光明节期间还要忙着去赢一场衰老比赛。”
Glorioso took her own baseline measurements back in August. Those initial tests suggested that her biological age was around 10 years below her chronological age. That sounded pretty impressive to me until I looked at the leaderboard and saw that competitor @Fred had a biological age 28.8 years below his chronological age. Glorioso 在 8 月份就进行了自己的基线测量。最初的测试显示，她的生物学年龄比生理年龄小约 10 岁。这听起来让我印象深刻，直到我查看排行榜，发现参赛者 @Fred 的生物学年龄比他的生理年龄小了 28.8 岁。
The leaderboard is pretty sparse at the moment, as only seven people have logged their baseline measurements so far. Six of them have biological ages tracking low, but one 47-year-old has been given a biological age of 68.1. She’s competing publicly, so I can see the breakdown of her scores. The worst is for the speed at which she can stand from sitting in a chair—by that measure, she’s been given a biological age of 100. 目前的排行榜还很冷清，因为到目前为止只有 7 人记录了他们的基线测量数据。其中 6 人的生物学年龄偏低，但有一位 47 岁的参赛者被测出的生物学年龄为 68.1 岁。她是公开参赛的，所以我可以看到她各项得分的细目。最差的一项是她从椅子上站起来的速度——根据这一指标，她的生物学年龄被判定为 100 岁。
Hillary Lin, a longevity-focused physician in New York, has just started logging her baseline measurements for the competition. She tells me she’s taken biological age tests in the past and that they’ve tended to give scores below her chronological age, which is currently 37. Last year, the Tr 纽约一位专注于长寿研究的医生 Hillary Lin 刚刚开始记录她的比赛基线测量数据。她告诉我，她过去曾做过生物学年龄测试，结果往往低于她目前的生理年龄（37 岁）。去年，Tr…