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Find out how non-linear aging impacts your health and
lifespan courtesy of a NYTimes.com guest post
New technologies are giving scientists a better understanding
how the aging process works.
By Mohana Ravindranath
March 6, 2025
For many people, aging feels like it happens in
stops and starts. After a period of smooth sailing,
one day, seemingly out of the blue, you have achy
knees.
“You wake up in the morning and you suddenly feel
old,” said Dr. Steve Hoffmann, a computational
biology professor at the Leibniz Institute on Aging
in Jena, Germany. “That’s sort of the
takeaway.”
It turns out there may be a scientific basis for
this experience. By analyzing age-related markers,
such as proteins and DNA tags in the bloodstream,
some scientists are coming to understand that aging
in adulthood is not a linear process, but perhaps
one that jumps dramatically at certain points in
one’s life.
Here’s what they’ve learned so far, and what it
could ultimately mean for your health and life
span.
What does ‘nonlinear aging’ look like?
Scientists have long suspected that aging may
happen in bursts, but they only began using
molecular signals to measure the pace of aging in
the past decade or so.
A widely covered Stanford study published last year
tracked several molecular changes associated with
aging in blood samples gathered from 108 adults
between age 25 and 75. By comparing samples from
different subjects of different ages, it found that
people seemed to age more rapidly around age 44,
and again around 60. The clusters of changes in the
first spike appeared to be mostly related to fat
and alcohol metabolism, as well as muscle function,
and the second spike mostly to immune dysfunction
and muscle function. The first spike could help
explain why people seem to have more trouble
processing alcohol starting in their 40s, and why
they become more prone to illness in their 60s,
said Michael Snyder, a professor of genetics at
Stanford Medicine and study coauthor.
Also last year, a study on mice coauthored by Dr.
Hoffmann found that sudden chemical modifications
to DNA occurred in the rodents’ early-to-mid life
and again in mid-to-late life, suggesting there
were three discrete stages of aging.
And in a 2019 study looking at the blood plasma of
over 4,000 people, scientists reported there were
significant jumps in concentrations of proteins
associated with aging in the fourth, seventh and
eighth decades of life.
Other experts think aging doesn’t necessarily
happen in short spurts, but rather in longer
phases. Steve Horvath, who is widely considered to
have pioneered the biological aging tools known as
epigenetic clocks, said a 2013 study he conducted
found that the rate of aging follows a steep curve
from early childhood until puberty, but becomes
linear after age 20. (Dr. Horvath is now principal
investigator at Altos Labs, a biotechnology company
focused on improving cell health and slowing
aging-related disease.)
There’s also early data suggesting that certain
organs — such as the heart or brain — may age
faster than others, said Tony Wyss-Coray, a
professor of neurology and neurological sciences at
Stanford University who was an author of the 2019
study.
Whether they happen in phases or spurts, it’s not
yet clear how all of these molecular changes
actually contribute to aging and age-related
disease. Still, these types of findings could offer
more insight into the biology underlying well-known
shifts in middle age, such as slowing metabolism,
said Allison Aiello, a professor of epidemiology at
the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center.
In practice, it could mean that people could be
more targeted in managing their health, focusing on
specific changes and conditions that correlate with
their particular age, said Aditi Gurkar, an
assistant professor of medicine at the University
of Pittsburgh’s Aging Institute.
What’s next?
These findings are “quite interesting, but I
would say preliminary,” said Dr. Eric Verdin, the
president and chief executive at the Buck Institute
for Research on Aging. And it brings up a whole
series of questions, he said: “What’s
happening? Which organ or collection of organs is
causing these big changes?”
There are other open questions, including if the
changes vary from individual to individual or
between the sexes, and how much lifestyle and
behavior may contribute, since there’s increasing
evidence that certain events — like pregnancy,
trauma and adversity or even a Covid infection —
can also accelerate biological aging.
Experts said they’re eager to answer these
questions with longitudinal studies that track
changes over a person’s lifetime. That method
would account for differences in environment or
lifestyle among subjects.
“If you really want to identify whether it’s a
linear trend, or there’s these spurts that occur
over very specific time periods, you’d want to
follow the same people to see if they’re
biological” changes, Dr. Aiello said.
So far, researchers are only “touching the
surface” of how molecular changes relate to
aging, said Dr. Luigi Ferrucci, the scientific
director of the National Institute on Aging. By
learning more, he added, they can help people live
better longer and head off disease. “Instead of
declining at 70, we can try to make it decline at
75, and gain five years of good life.”
How will you use this news to extend your healthy longevity?
Hadley Finch
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