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Telomere testing

telomere genetics teloyears.com real age

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#1 APBT

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Posted 31 October 2016 - 12:01 AM


Here's a company that will test telomere length with a simple finger-prick blood test (mail in).  Has anyone used this service?

 

https://www.teloyear...home/index.html

 



#2 Oakman

  • Location:CO

Posted 23 November 2016 - 05:49 PM

I just noticed this as well. There "report" is pretty sketchy, lacking much of anything but a Teloyear age. Not exactly sure what else they might be able to offer. Have you seen any other tests like this to compare their offering too? But still, for $89...


Edited by Oakman, 23 November 2016 - 05:50 PM.


#3 HaplogroupW

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Posted 14 February 2017 - 06:28 AM

>There "report" is pretty sketchy, lacking much of anything but a Teloyear age.

 

They do report a unitless "telomere length" number too.

 

One can download the whitepaper from their website. It says they use "Cawthorn qPCR assay" for average length, then compute the ratio of "telomere signal vs the single copy gene signal". They say that ratio is typically in the range 0.8 (80 years old) to 1.2 (20 years old), and that appears to be the number they report as "telomere length" on the Test Report that they send you.

 

I did this in December, and got the report about a month ago. They report my telomere length as 1.38, which is off-the-charts long. They say my "TeloYears" is < 20 years old. I'm 50 years old. They say that puts me in the 99.8th percentile group for my telomere length.

 

I've been thinking of starting a "post your telomere length" thread and invite people to post their telomere length, and any distinctive life-style facts and supplement regimens that might be relevant. Maybe this thread will do for that purpose.

 

Since my number was so unusually high, here are the things that might be related to it:

1) I was somewhat overweight for most of my adult life, until about four years ago when I started gradually going more low-carb high-fat and riding the bike again about 20-40 miles/day, ~ 5 times/week,. I ride with intensity about like a competitive cyclist, though I don't race. I'm now about 160 lbs/ 5'10", and for most of my adult life was 190-210 lbs. 

2) I took a couple bottles of TA-65 about five years ago (over the course of about a year), a bottle of Crack Aging cyclo-astragenol about a two or three years ago, and was working through a bottle of astragalus root about starting some months before the test.

3) I've been a chain green-tea drinker for over 15 years. Don't remember exactly when I started; around 2000, I think. My work-day habit is to brew a cup of green tea in the microwave every hour or two.

4) I've been a "heavy drinker" for the last 10 years by the criteria I read online: 4 drinks/day typically, wine and beer, though a few nights/month I don't drink.  So my liver cells may not have telomeres as long as the thrombocytic which they measured.

5) One grandfather died at 103.  Other grandparents died much younger (30s, 60s, 70s) from cancer or heart disease.

6) Several things I've heard from Bill Andrews are correlated with longer telomeres apply to me: father and grandfather > 30 years old when son was born, and acne. I didn't just have regular acne. I had the cystic kind that has left some scars.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Edited by Postprandial, 14 February 2017 - 06:33 AM.

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#4 PeaceAndProsperity

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Posted 22 February 2017 - 12:37 AM

>There "report" is pretty sketchy, lacking much of anything but a Teloyear age.

 

They do report a unitless "telomere length" number too.

 

One can download the whitepaper from their website. It says they use "Cawthorn qPCR assay" for average length, then compute the ratio of "telomere signal vs the single copy gene signal". They say that ratio is typically in the range 0.8 (80 years old) to 1.2 (20 years old), and that appears to be the number they report as "telomere length" on the Test Report that they send you.

 

I did this in December, and got the report about a month ago. They report my telomere length as 1.38, which is off-the-charts long. They say my "TeloYears" is < 20 years old. I'm 50 years old. They say that puts me in the 99.8th percentile group for my telomere length.

This is enough for me to regard the company as fraudulent. Your telomere lengths are obviously not that long, I refuse to believe that.

It's possible that it's a matter of the difficulty of testing telomere lengths as different cells have different lengths.



#5 Turnbuckle

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Posted 22 February 2017 - 11:02 AM

There are enormous variations in telomere length and the correlation with age is not exactly dramatic. Huge numbers of people >80 have telomeres longer than the average of those who are 20. The following plot is the raw data from a Danish study with almost 65,000 subjects and a 0-22 year followup. They found, among other things, that "short telomeres were associated with low cancer mortality but not with all-cause mortality."

 

Telomere-length-vs-age1.png


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#6 Oakman

  • Location:CO

Posted 22 February 2017 - 03:09 PM

The reason these reports are (functionally) rather dubious isn't that they are not fairly accurate unto themselves, it's that they are only testing blood component telomere length. There are many, many different cell types in the body, and each has a telomere component. They use this finger pick testing because it's easily obtained. How would they quickly and easily obtain muscle, liver, brain, or other tissue to test telomere length, short of a biopsy or autopsy? They can not.

 

Read the book, Telomere Timebombs, Diffusing the Terror of Aging, by Ed Park, MD, and you'll understand....e.g., Chapter 4, Telomerase, "A Parable to Illustrate the Absurdity of Using LTL to Predict Anything". [LTL=leukocyte telomere length]

 

other reference: 

Telomere length in epidemiology: a biomarker of aging, age-related disease, both, or neither?

[excerpt] To properly interpret results from an epidemiologic study, one must understand the methodological approaches to measuring telomere length, particularly their efficiency, reproducibility, and functional reasons for underestimating or overestimation of LTL. In population-based studies, telomere length is measured almost exclusively as LTL. Measurement protocols dictate that leukocytes are retrieved from blood, so patient harm consists of only that associated with a typical blood draw. It should be acknowledged that, although there is synchrony in telomere length among hematopoietic cells (38), LTL might not be a perfect surrogate for telomere length in other tissues (1). Furthermore, LTL represents the average telomere length across leukocytes, which are a heterogeneous cell population composed of granulocytes and lymphocytes. These subpopulations have different average telomere lengths. Lymphocytes have shorter telomeres than granulocytes at all ages, because granulocytes are related more closely to hematopoietic stem cells, which are less differentiated (39). In addition to the absolute length, these subpopulations differ in their rates of telomere shortening.

 


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#7 HaplogroupW

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Posted 12 May 2017 - 06:28 AM

I got test results from Titanovo. TeloYears used a blood sample. Titanovo used buccal swab (cheek cells).

 

They comport with the TeloYears results, in that both reported long telomere length for my age. See above for TeloYears results. Titanovo reports both a unitless ratio, and also an absolute number of base pairs. These were 2.08 T/S, and base pairs at 9150 base pairs. On the chart Titanovo uses to show my result, my telomere length is way outside the 70% confidence band for even 0-year olds.

 

I don't think the unitless ratios from the two companies can be directly compared; the gene length used for the denominator of the ratio differs between the two companies. They show different reference ranges; the Titanovo range is roughly (from eyeballing their chart) about 0.85 for 0 years, 0.74 for 20 years, and 0.45 for 80 years old.

 

I recall Dr. Andrews saying that roughly we are born at 15 kbp, born at 10 kbp, and die at 5kbp, as a point of reference.

 

So conclusions about the two services:

1) The consistency of the Titanovo's and TeloYears' results gives me some confidence in their tests. Using samples from different cell populations they both arrived at qualitatively the same result.

2) Titanovo didn't notify me when results were ready; not even email. I happened to log on to their site, and the result was there. TeloYears sends a glossy brochure with lots of extraneous stuff, giving life-style advice (and some bad dietary advice IMO).

3) Titanovo reports an absolute number of base pairs (I don't know if it's mean or median), which I like, whereas TeloYears did not.

 

 

 

 


Edited by HaplogroupW, 12 May 2017 - 06:33 AM.


#8 HaplogroupW

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Posted 12 May 2017 - 05:50 PM

Please ignore my above post. Apparently the results I got from Titanovo were bad. I got an email from them saying:

 

"During uploading the data from the latest batch the results were not converted from kbps (actual telomere length in absolute units) to T/S (our internal standard). Because of that affected users have noticed very long telomeres (unrealistically) in their reports."

 

Now the corrected report shows my telomere length in the "normal" range, a little shorter than average for my age. The absolute telomere length they report is 2.07 kbp, where they say a base pair is a base pair repeat = TTAGGG.

 

So we no longer observe  consistent results between TeloYears and Titanovo. Either because they looked at different cell populations, or maybe one or both is less accurate.

 

 

 

 



#9 Oakman

  • Location:CO

Posted 14 May 2017 - 08:41 PM

Physical activity and telomere length in U.S. men and women: An NHANES investigation

 

Some good news re: telomere length for those who exercise at least 5 times per week for 30-45 minutes...

http://www.sciencedi...091743517301470

 

Highlights

 

Telomeres are nucleoprotein caps positioned at the end of chromosomes.

Aging causes telomeres to shorten significantly and results in gradual cell deterioration.

Regular physical activity reduces disease risk, possibly due to the preservation of telomeres.

Results showed that regular activity accounted for significantly longer telomeres in U.S. adults.

The longer telomeres found in active adults accounted for 9 years of reduced cellular aging.


Edited by Oakman, 14 May 2017 - 08:46 PM.

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