4 replies to this topic

[relativityboy]

I'm interested in a comparison of currently available-to-the-masses telomere measuring services. I'm going to play the dummy here and ask the community to fill in all the gaps.

 

LifeLength is supposed to be the gold standard, but why? 

 

Titanovo is popular...

 

TeloAge was started by a Nobel Prize winner, but is considered kinda janky, did they go all "Dr. Freeman"?

 

And what about SpectraCell?

 

Others?

[Fafner55]

I have tried two telomere testing companies -

 

1) Titanovo offers a simple cheek cell swab test for $129. My test result gave an estimated age of 18 compared to my true age at the time of 61. I emailed the company twice with short, factual questions to clarify statements in the results they sent me and got no response. This company has every appearance of being a scam.

https://titanovo.com/ 

 

2) Teloyears offers a "jab your finger" blood test for average telomere length for $89. For this test, my estimated age was 65 compared to my true age of 61. This result seems credible.

https://www.teloyears.com/home/ 

[GreenPower]

I would say that Repeat Diagnostics sets the Gold Standard. They have been around for more than a decade and makes use of the highly accurate Flow-FISH method. Like gold its unfortunately quite expensive, the full test is 800 USD.

 

LifeLength is probably the runner up. Unlike Repeat Diagnostics they don't present results for specific cell types. Instead they provide the median and average telomere length of all the peripheral blood mononuclear cells. At 250 € this test cost about a third of the full test at Repeat Diagnostics. I do however miss the promised histogram results from LifeLength and have asked why it wasn't included with the rest of my results.

 

 

[GreenPower]

After some discussions with the support at LifeLength I've separately got a histogram with the "percentual distribution (Y) over fluorescence intensity (X)". It was not included with the standard TAT-report.

I did not get the percentual distribution (Y) over the "Telomere length (kb)" (X) which they have attached to their instructions on how to interpret the TAT-report. It would seem they no longer have the underlying IT-support to produce this histogram. I've made a request for it to be included in the future again, and with a little bit of luck it might be. In the meatime - any clues on how to translate "fluorescence intensity" to "Telomere length (kb)" are greatly appreciated!

 

The third attempt to deliver my samples to Repeat Diagnostics through FedEx was as success!

FedEx is obviously not as reliable as it was a couple of years ago. On the first attempt they messed up the connecting flight between Paris and Memphis and on the second attempt they messed up with the connecting flight between Memphis and Seattle/Vancouver. Both samples were too old upon actually delivery. They have agreed to credit the delivery fee for the first sample and I'm waiting for them to agree to credit the delivery fee for the second delivery failure as well. They attributed their delivery failures to "too high workload".

 

I would have loved to be able to compare the results between LifeLength and RepeatDiagnostics, but this is unfortunately not possible. Because FedEx wasn't able to deliver the first and second sample on time, it will be a three week difference for the third sample sent to RepeatDiagnostics compared to the sample analyzed by LifeLength. It's not possible to compare their results unless the samples were drawn at the exact same time.

 

RepeatDiagnostics are also no longer able to provide a measurement of Standard Deviation at an additional cost ($400 extra), as they have been able to do in the past. They also attribute this to "too high workload":

 

Is it just me, or does it seem we have had a decline in service levels the last few years...

[abelard lindsay]

I got my TeloYears measured.  It says I am 10 years younger than my current age and I have telomeres longer than 95% of people my age (1.28 T/S Ratio).  

 

This is probably due to taking a bottle or two of TA-65 a while ago and Astragalus semi-regularly for quite some time.  Since CREB activation is theorized to be the mechanism of action of Astragalus's ability to lengthen telomeres (See: https://www.ncbi.nlm...pubmed/25095809 ) , CILTEP could theoretically have helped some.  As far as negatives go: I do work out, but I'm not a super athlete and have not had a perfectly stress free life.  

 

I think Teloyears redid some of their stats as the chart on this page (  https://www.teloyear...html#calculated ) says that anyone with a T/S ratio of 1.10 or greater is less than 20 years old in Teloyears.  I also saw some earlier Teloyears reports people put up on the web that used this scale ( See: https://bengreenfiel...elomere-length/ ) .  I asked a counselor at the company about this change in how the stats were calculated and she handwaved something vague about confidence intervals.   

 

The test was $89, so I feel like it was reasonably worth it for a quantified self geek like me.