Measuring your Biological Age has been extremely popularized because of how highly correlated it is to almost every chronic disease and death. However, the Biological Age of a person is limited in the sense that it is a “historical-based” age, meaning it only captures how quickly you’ve been aging since your inception up until the present moment.
Have you ever wondered how quickly you’re aging at this very second? We need a metric that can tell us if we are currently aging in the right direction or the wrong direction. Because of Dr. Terrie Moffitt and other researchers at Duke, Columbia University, and the University of Otago there is now a new metric available that captures just that called the “DunedinPACE”.
I’ve been lucky enough to know Dr. Terrie Moffitt through my company, TruDiagnostic, as we have the exclusive license to the DunedinPACE in all verticals. Dr. Moffitt’s uplifting attitude and outlook of being “cautiously optimistic” when working with the Dunedin cohort and other researchers using the DunedinPACE makes for a fun and interesting conversation.
In my first ever episode of the Everything Epigenetics podcast, Dr. Terrie Moffit speaks with me about the Dunedin cohort and how she and her team developed the DunedinPACE tool. Building the database took the international team over five decades (and counting), while they tracked biological changes in the bodies of 1037 New Zealanders who are members of the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development study, a project that began with their birth in 1972. When initially asking the National Institute of Aging, the peer reviewers thought that focusing on a 30 age cohort was incorrect. They thought there would be no variation and if there was it would be insignificant. Dr. Terrie Moffitt has recently traveled back to Dunedin, New Zealand with her team to collect the fifth round of data on the cohort participants, as they are now 52 years-old.
In this podcast you’ll hear:
– A discussion of the Dunedin cohort and the significance of its retention rate
– The difference between DunedinPoAm and DunedinPACE
– How you can measure your pace of aging using the DunedinPACE
– The importance of the relationship between an increased DunedinPACE and disease
– How Biological Age Clocks differ from the DunedinPACE
– The application of DunedinPACE in clinical trials looking at anti-aging therapeutics, personal use, and surgical candidates for outcomes
– Dr. Moffitt’s point of view about being “cautiously optimistic”
– The type of sample collection and retest window required for DunedinPACE
– The difficulty with obtaining methylation data from both blood and saliva samples
– A quick overview of the CALERIE trial
– What factors accelerate and decelerate the DunedinPACE (according to the literature)
– The future of the DunedinPACE
If you’re interested in testing your DunedinPACE, you can use the code everythingepi for 12% off each product at TruDiagnostic.com
In addition, the algorithm to calculate DunedinPACE is on GitHub where any scientist with epigenetics expertise can access it to run their data for research purposes, so long as there is no commercial use intended.
Terrie E. Moffitt, Ph.D., is the Nannerl O. Keohane (KEO-HANE) University Professor of Psychology at Duke University, and Professor of Social Development at King’s College London.
Her expertise is in the areas of longitudinal methods, developmental theory, clinical mental health research, neuropsychology, and genomics in behavioral science. She is uncovering the consequences of a lifetime of mental and behavioral disorder on processes of aging.
Dr. Moffitt is the Associate Director of the Dunedin Longitudinal Study, which follows a 1972 birth cohort in New Zealand. She also co-founded the Environmental Risk Longitudinal Twin Study (E-Risk), which follows a 1994 birth cohort in the UK. Dr. Moffitt also is a licensed clinical psychologist, with specialization in neuropsychological assessment. She has a published record of collaboration with criminologists, economists, geneticists, epidemiologists, sociologists, (DA) demographers, gerontologists, statisticians, neuroscientists, medical scientists, even ophthalmologists and dentists.
Dr. Moffitt’s work was recognized in 2018 by election to the National Academy of Medicine. She holds honorary doctorates from the Katholieke Universiteit (LOOVAN) Leuven, Belgium, and Universitat (Baazel) Basel, Switzerland. For her research, Dr. Moffitt has received both the American Psychological Association’s Early Career Contribution Award and Distinguished Career Award.
Dr. Moffitt was also awarded a Royal Society-Wolfson Merit Award, the Klaus-Grawe Prize, and was a recipient of the Stockholm Prize in Criminology, National Alliance for Research on Scizophrenia and Depression (NARSAD) Ruane Prize, the Klaus J. Jacobs Research Prize, and in 2022 the Grawemeyer Prize.
Her service includes serving as chair of the Board on Behavioral, Cognitive, and Sensory Science at The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), Chair of the NIA Data Monitoring Committee for the Health and Retirement Study, and Chair of the Jury for the Klaus J. Jacobs Prize in Switzerland. She is a fellow of the British Academy, Academy of Medical Sciences (UK), Academia Europa, Association of Psychological Science, American Society of Criminology and the National Academy of Medicine.
Dr. Moffitt attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for her undergraduate degree in psychology. She continued her training in psychology at the University of Southern California, receiving an M.A. in experimental animal behavior, and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. She also completed postdoctoral training in geriatrics and neuropsychology at the University of California, Los Angeles Neuropsychiatric Institute. In her spare time, she works on her poison-ivy farm in North Carolina.