My name is Terrie Moffitt and I've spent my career studying how people develop over time and across
ages and many years with a special focus on how different people can be, how some people develop
fast, others slow, and that influences how their lives turn out.
My name is Avshalom Caspi
and I study how people differ from each other and in my work what I try to do is develop
tools and technologies to capture the differences between people and their mental health as well as
in how fast they're aging.
And we're married to each other.
Have been for 31 years.
That's right.
The Dunedin study is a study of all of the babies born in one city in 1972-73
a calendar year there were 1037 of them at the beginning there are 994 still alive today and 94
of them are still taking part in the study after these five decades have passed. So it's really an incredible research resource.
Our definition of aging takes advantage of the fact that we have been following the same 1000
people now for five decades and every five years we bring them in and do complete physical exams.
So we save all those data and we see them five years later we do the same exams again.
[CASPI] So it's the coordinated age-related decline of multiple organ systems and we get at that
by tracking biomarkers that are tapping the function of all those organ systems and watching
how they are declining in synchrony.
And we can track different organ systems for example heart, lungs, and their cholesterol,
their body mass index, their blood pressure
their inflammatory responses over time.
What we're interested in is the extent to which if you have C reactive protein measured at age 26, 32, 38, 45, 50, going on like that
is that also correlated with your blood pressure, your cholesterol, your body mass index, other kinds
of indicators that might be changing with age and if they're synchronized then it's aging.
When I started working with this longitudinal study, I was interested
in adolescent development. So I was studying things like risky sex and shoplifting and
teenage drinking those kinds of of problems and then as the sample got older
they sort of dragged us along with with them and we had to move from studying um
risky sex to now studying infertility and menopause and this led us to the the study
of aging so it's been a steep learning curve.
One of the beauties about doing longitudinal research
is that the longitudinal study itself becomes the source of the kinds of questions that you ask
so as we watch the cohort that we have been studying now for you know several decades
grow up and grow older watching their lives gives rise to a whole set of new questions.
What I'm really interested in and amazed by is that when we saw them last in 2019
on their 45th birthday they were so wildly different from each other I mean the variation
that you get at that age was just shocking. For example,
some people have been aging about two years per biologically per chronological year
so they had aged 40 years in the past 20 years that we've been measuring aging. Other people
have measured only about half a year so they have actually stayed young uh they're they're sort of
now at 45 they're physiologically and biologically the way they were in their early thirties.
What you're finding in our work is that a whole host of mental disorders that emerge early in life
are associated with an accelerated pace of aging later in life so for example disorders
such as depression psychotic disorders even conditions such as ADHD all appear to be
linked to a faster pace of aging and one of the reasons we're so
interested in that is that we know that in fact these mental disorders are treatable.
But it could be that any kind of illness that a person has in early life would contribute to
poor aging by the time they reach midlife so we chose a physical illness that's similar to mental
disorders: asthma. It comes on about the same early age and it's very common in the population it even
involves inflammatory processes and difficulty with breathing we expected asthma to also
be a factor that causes accelerated aging and it does not. So far we don't find that
in the data so this seems to be particular uh this effect is particular to mental disorders.
So one of the challenges that we've had in our work is to take these you know 20, 25 years of data
that we have collected using multiple biomarkers to watch people's age-related decline and
translate that into one single measure that you can get at any time and to do that what we've done
is we've gone to the methylome and looked at DNA methylation.
[MOFFITT] We have surveyed their entire genome to look at the methylation marks.
There are hundreds of thousands of those all across the genome.
And life experience leaves a signature in those marks so you can use artificial intelligence
techniques to train the whole genome to recognize the pace of aging score of a person
and then that way that generates a score that could anybody could do with just a blood test
as long as it as they have methylation data in it.
So we've developed this piece of technology. Duke Office of Licensing and Ventures has licensed it
to a company called TruDiagnostics and it's now available it's called DunedinPACE p-a-c-e
it could be used in GP's offices to test people's pace of aging in a blood test and
let them know how fast they're aging because it could be a motivator for improving our diet,
exercise, smoking those kinds of health behaviors that we have control over. It could be used as a
blood test in randomized clinical trials of treatments that are intending to slow aging.
If you can somehow slow aging, you might be able to slow not just one disease or prevent just
one disease but you might actually be able to prevent multiple diseases.
We probably won't extend longevity much further than we already have with medical technology but what you can
do and what we're trying to work on is ways that would allow us to make those extra years
that we are all getting these days more healthy, free from disease and that's called healthspan.
We now know because of them how important a good childhood is for late life so
really I've been thinking about you know trying to convey this message to people from the Dunedin
study in New Zealand that a happy childhood is a happy old age
they go hand in hand and I think that's so important and it a lot can grow from it.