A new study from King’s College London and Yale School of Medicine reveals that molecular aging processes differ significantly between people, even those of the same chronological age. Researchers found that gene activity and metabolite levels change over time in unique ways for each individual, complicating the use of single metrics to measure biological age.
Researchers followed 335 women ages 32 to 80 from the TwinsUK cohort for eight years, collecting blood samples and measuring gene activity and metabolite levels during at least three clinic visits between 2009 and 2017. The cohort includes identical and fraternal twin pairs, and detailed health and biological data. The study aimed to move beyond single-point-in-time comparisons to observe changes within individuals over time.
Of over 16,000 genes and 915 metabolites analyzed, 5,061 genes and 181 metabolites changed significantly over the eight years. A large majority of these genes—5,036—showed a consistent increase or decrease across the group, as did 45 metabolites. Many of these genes are linked to immune function, metabolism, and age-related conditions.
“Molecular aging is dynamic and unique to each person,” said study co-author Julia El-Sayed Moustafa, a computational genomics researcher at King’s College London. Raghav Sehgal, an associate research scientist at the Yale School of Medicine who was not involved in the research, explained that “biological aging is less like a fixed score and more like a changing set of molecular trajectories.” He added, “No single number can fully capture the many systems that age at different rates.” The findings suggest that current “aging clocks,” which use molecular markers to estimate biological age, may be overly simplistic.
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