“I’d expected to see slowing down of the clock, but not a reversal.” Ageing
A small clinical study in California, United States , has suggested for the first time that it might be possible to reverse the body’s epigenetic clock, which measures a person’s biological age.
“I’d expected to see slowing down of the clock, but not a reversal,” said geneticist Steve Horvath at the University of California, Los Angeles , who conducted the epigenetic analysis. “That felt kind of futuristic.”Cell biologist, Wolfgang Wagner at the University of Aachen in Germany, said: “It may be that there is an effect. But the results are not rocked solid because the study is very small and not well controlled.
The latest trial was designed mainly to test whether growth hormone could be used safely in humans to restore tissue in the thymus gland. The gland, which is in the chest between the lungs and the breastbone, is crucial for efficient immune function. White blood cells are produced in the bone marrow and then mature inside the thymus, where they become specialized T cells that help the body to fight infections and cancers.
Fahy’s fascination with the thymus goes back to 1986 when he read a study in which scientists transplanted growth-hormone-secreting cells into rats, apparently rejuvenating their immune systems. He was surprised that no one seemed to have followed up on the result with a clinical trial. A decade later, at age 46, he treated himself for a month with growth hormone and DHEA and found some regeneration of his own thymus.
Horvath used four different epigenetic clocks to assess each patient’s biological age, and he found significant reversal for each trial participant in all of the tests. “This told me that the biological effect of the treatment was robust,” he said. What is more, the effect persisted in the six participants who provided a final blood sample six months after stopping the trial, he said.
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