New Contest Pits Competitors Against Each Other in a Race to Biological Youth

The event is scheduled to begin in January, Glorioso told MIT Technology Review, though about 120 people have already signed up and some have started their six-month runs. Each participant’s run starts after they take baseline measurements, whenever that occurs. Glorioso said she expects 500 participants and that most people will likely sign up after the holidays, because they will not want to try to win an aging contest over Christmas and Hanukkah. She took her own baseline measurements in August.

Standard competitors pay $999 to enter, according to the report. Ultra competitors pay $4,499 and receive a broader set of blood tests and aging clocks, as well as MRI and DEXA scans. MIT Technology Review reported that its writer received complimentary press access to the standard package after signing up.

Participants in the standard package will send a blood spot sample to TruDiagnostic, a company that measures epigenetic chemical groups on DNA and offers an overall biological age, a pace-of-aging score, and biological ages for 11 organ systems, including the heart and brain. They will receive a brain age score from NeuroAge after completing cognitive tasks, and they will submit physical measures such as grip strength. They will also upload selfies to an app developed by a team at Harvard that estimates face age. Winners will include the person with the greatest difference between chronological and biological age and the person who reverses their biological age the most.

Aging clocks are tools designed to measure biological age. Many measure chemical signatures that form a layer on top of DNA and appear to change with age, while others examine proteins or lipids in blood. Some assess functional health, and others predict when a person will die. More than 100 clocks exist, and each probably captures a specific aspect of the biological process of aging, MIT Technology Review reported. Scientists use them to study aging and development in humans and many other species, but using them to estimate an individual person’s biological age is more controversial because they are not yet good enough and because it is not fully understood what each clock captures.

Glorioso said she has several goals for the contest. The first is to explain to the world what aging clocks are, she told MIT Technology Review. She hopes data collected through Younger will help answer what the clocks capture and generate what she called the world’s most comprehensive clock dataset. Some longevity clinics use multiple clocks to work around the limits of biological age testing, and the competition takes the same approach.

Glorioso also hopes to gather information about the effects of some purported longevity approaches. During the competition, some participants will be offered red-light masks, access to a sauna, or other low-risk offerings from partner companies sponsoring the event to varying degrees and seeking data. Many of these companies cannot afford to run clinical trials, Glorioso said. She also described the event as a public health initiative. A couple of years ago, David Sinclair, who studies aging at Harvard Medical School, and his colleagues estimated that slowing aging in the general population and increasing life expectancy by one year would save the US economy $38 trillion.

MIT Technology Review reported that its writer, who recently turned 40, was intrigued to see the scores but knew not to put too much stock in them. Four years earlier, a biological age test gave the writer a result that matched chronological age. A year later, the same company told the writer they had a young heart but a relatively old brain, liver, and hormonal system. The writer’s lifestyle had not changed much since then, leaving open the question of whether the years would make much difference.