Name: 老化生物学者だけど「加齢について」質問ある？ | Tech Support | WIRED Japan
Uploaded: 2025-02-25T09:21:43.000Z
Duration: 17 min 33 s
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I'm a professor who specializes in biology of aging.

Future continuous

Today I'll be answering your questions from Twitter.

This is Aging Support. ["Aging Support"] First up, BamaBrat74.

Why does the aging process have to be so dang painful?

Over our lifespans, we have a lot of biological and molecular changes that accumulate in our bodies.

And ultimately this makes our bodies function less ideally and causes a lot of these manifestations we see with aging.

The aches, the pains, the chronic diseases.

However, in aging science, we actually think that we can disentangle chronological time from biological aging.

So chronological age is what it says on your driver's license.

However, this is different from what we call biological age, which is really measuring the state of the organism.

We might say that even though you're chronologically 50 years old, you have a biological state that actually resembles someone who's more like a 60-year-old.

And what that means is we can actually slow the rate at which these changes accumulate, or maybe even reverse them and go back to a better functioning state.

And with that, we would actually give people more years of life without the painful parts of aging.

Why are hangovers getting worse as we age?

And actually a lot of scientists think that it's just that you have poor recall of what your hangovers used to be.

And actually, there is no evidence that hangovers get worse necessarily as we age.

And you might just be forgetting how bad they were when you were younger.

This could also be in terms of childbirth, why women might actually be more willing to have a kid again because they don't remember how shitty it was to give birth the first time.

This is a fundamental question in biology.

I think of it as up there with what is life?

It's actually why I got really interested in this field as a whole.

So an aging system is what we call a very complex system.

You have to have all your molecules and cells in a very particular pattern to support aging.

So almost, I like to use the analogy of the sand art.

You can lay out these different things in a very specific manner.

And when it comes to life, if you don't have that exact pattern, you don't have life.

The problem is that it's hard to maintain this.

So with any biochemical reaction that your body undergoes, you can get a slight shift.

And over time, these accumulate in your system.

And we think that these are why you're manifesting as aging because you develop a state that is less compatible with life than you originally had.

Next up, Eleanor Schicke asked, how much of aging is genetic?

The good news is it isn't that heritable.

We actually think that only about 10 to maybe 20% of your lifespan is dictated by your genes.

And this is good news because it actually means we have a lot more control over how fast we're aging.

All right, next up, a question from Meg Sugarpop.

The science doesn't say that it can't happen, but we're not close to doing this.

We are close to showing that we can slow the aging process.

There is even some evidence that we can reverse aging in some degree, especially in cells.

You can take cells from someone who is, let's say 65 years old, and convert them back to a cell that actually looks like an embryonic stem cell.

So we do think we have some power to change aging, but to take an entire person, stop the aging process altogether, and hold them frozen at that age forever, I think is probably a little far-fetched.

Katrina Dr. Selick asks, tell me then without saying anything misogynistic, how do men and women age differently?

Even though we might not be doing quite as well in terms of the pay gap, we're actually doing better than men in terms of the longevity gap.

Women tend to live about four and a half years longer than men when you look at the world population.

And even more than that, if we look at centenarians, so these are people who live to at least age 100, women make up 83% of that population.

But unfortunately, it's actually not all good news.

So there are definitely sex differences in terms of kind of how we age.

So women tend to be much more at risk for things like frailty, and for diseases like Alzheimer's disease and osteoporosis.

So even though we might live longer, we do tend to suffer more for some of these debilitating conditions.

So next up from jhans3, I've been plant-based for a minute, but last week I ate meat and I feel my absolute best right now.

Actually, longevity science says plant-based diet is probably the best diet.

There's a lot of evidence from both epidemiological, which is the science when you actually look at populations, as well as some more emerging clinical trials that suggest that a diet rich in mostly plant-based foods can actually extend your lifespan and prevent disease.

Next up from sabaitaraman, what are the barriers to figuring out biomarkers or hallmarks to aging?

Is it that no one else has focused in on it too much or lack of funding and people believing in it?

I feel a little hurt by this question because this is what I work on and I work really hard on it.

So I don't think this is just for lack of effort, but this is actually a really complex, difficult thing to figure out.

In terms of actually developing biomarkers of aging or hallmarks of aging, we have to first be able to actually measure these changes, which is hard in and of itself.

But even after we can measure it, we have tons and tons of data.

Imagine millions or billions of variables that we can actually have to put together to identify patterns.

So this isn't just some easy feat that, oh, you just need to look in a cell and figure out what happens with age.

Because aging process is so multifactorial, so many things happen, we actually have to use a lot of computer science and machine learning coupled with molecular biology to really figure out not just what's going on, but what things are actually causing or driving the aging process.

From Pretty Maddie, does the aging process slow down in space?

There was a twin study with actually the Kelly twins who actually looked when one stayed on earth and one went to space, what happened to them in comparison to their aging.

And unfortunately, they actually found that going into space seemed to accelerate a lot of these hallmarks of aging or things that we associate with the aging process.

So we know that there's gravitational time dilation.

So actually it would slow down the closer you are to earth, but there's also time dilation in terms of the speed at which you're traveling.

So if you're traveling faster, time slows down.

So it's hard to say, it depends on what you're doing in space.

Kenick Edge asked, is healthspan like lifespan?

It's basically how long you're alive, but a lot of people haven't heard this term healthspan.

And really what we use the term healthspan to mean is the amount of time you're alive without disease or without some age-related functional impairment.

So even though healthspan and lifespan are linked, we think if you can extend your healthspan, you'll probably also live longer.

There are actually two different things and healthspan is more the part we care about.

We don't all want to just have more and more years in a kind of more debilitated disease state.

So this is the part that aging research is trying to target.

Next up, we have a question from Amy Harmon.

Sciencey people, have there been some definitive debunking and or validation of blue zones?

Do centenarians in fact cluster there or no?

So for those of you who don't know, blue zones are these places throughout the world where they tend to have an enrichment of people who survive to age 100.

There have not been debunking of blue zones.

Longer lived people do live in these places, but the reason that they're longer lived is still debatable.

So a lot of people speculate that they have really good healthy lifestyles.

They tend to be people who eat more plant-based diet, have really active lifestyles and less stress.