According to scientists and medical ethicist there are hidden dangers of a new blood test for determining how fast someone is ageing. The test costs £435 test and is due to go on sale to the general public in Britain later this year, measures the length of a person's telomeres, the structures on the tips of the chromosomes which get progressively shorter with age. Short telomeres are linked with age-related diseases and premature death.
Experts warn that people may misunderstand the limitations of the test, which purports to measure a person's true “biological” age rather than the usual chronological age. They are also concerned that the information may be used by insurance companies and organizations trying to sell fake anti-ageing remedies.
Colin Blakemore, an Oxford neuroscientist and former head of the Medical Research Council said as much adding, “I'm skeptical and concerned about this test mainly because of the lack of evidence that this information is useful and yet this test touches on really significant issues, such as predictions of life expectancy…My pressing concern is just how reliable these tests are in terms of anything significant. We need to know an awful lot more before we make predictive statements. People worry about how predictive it is.”
Thomas Von Zglinicki, a professor of cellular gerontology at Newcastle University, added that it is not yet clear how accurate such telomere tests are when applied to individuals. “To sell this to the public is premature and I will not buy it,” Professor Von Zglinicki said.
Medical ethicist Piers Benn, formerly of Imperial College London, explained that there are deeper philosophical dangers of using a test that may estimate how long a person has left to live. “If we knew when and how we will die, that would influence the way we lived; we shape our future in the light of the uncertainty in which we live…We need to avoid the fatalism which says that I'm going to die on a certain date so why should I give up smoking or avoiding bad foods,” he said.
Josephine Quintavale, of the pressure group Comment on Reproductive Ethics, warned that such tests might be used to marginalize the elderly. “Sadly, the elderly are already not the most popular members of society when it comes to healthcare allocation and I could definitely foresee a culture of not spending resources on those with short telomeres,” she said.
The Spanish company behind the test, Life Length, is in discussions with a company that operates in Britain to market the test over the counter later this year. Maria Blasco of the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre in Madrid, who is the inventor of the test said the test is accurate in detecting dangerously short telomeres which are linked with age-related diseases and premature death. “We know that people who are born with shorter telomeres than normal also have a shorter lifespan. We know that shorter telomeres can cause a shorter lifespan,” Dr Blasco said.
Some experts are clear in their advice. They say whether a person has short or long telomere almost never directly translates to how many years he or she is going to live. What actually matters is the lifestyle – whether or not they follow a proper diet, get enough exercise, and refrain from smoking and other risky habits. Those are the keys to living a long, healthy life – not chromosomal structures in the body that one ultimately has no control over.
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