A blood test to measure your life expectancy

A simple blood test can tell us how long we will live? This is what the Guardian journalist Giles Tremlett tries to find out after many newspapers announced that a Spanish laboratory research in biology has developed a blood test predict our remaining life.

The test is based on the idea that the aging process is partly determined by the size of telomeres, the protective caps found at the ends of chromosomes. Normally we get older more and more the telomeres shrink, lifestyle and stress play an important role in this phase of degeneration. According to the Guardian, observe the telomeres can afford to whether a person is "biologically" younger or older than people the same age.

For Maria Blasco, a biologist at the head of the Spanish research center against cancer specialist and telomeres, the determining parameter is the number of short telomeres, which are not only a reflection of aging, but the cause:

"Small telomeres are responsible for disease because when they are below a certain size, they are harmful to cells. Stem cells of our tissues do not regenerate, and tissues age. "

Perhaps because of the somewhat ambiguous slogan Site Life Length, a journalist from Independent encouraged readers to learn more about what he called "the test to 400 pounds that tells you how long you will live ". The author of the article in the Guardian says that the net blood a bit special created the buzz, and that requests for testing more and more took by surprise the Spanish laboratory headed by Maria Blasco.

However, in an interview on the New York Times, the Nobel Prize for Medicine Carol Greider (rewarded for his work on telomeres) and former professor Maria Blasco, argues that these tests on the size of telomeres are useless, "the science n is really not there to tell you what will be the consequences on your life telomere length, "she adds.

Maria Blasco remains convinced that with more resources, these advances will allow to develop reliable tests, and especially to provide treatment for the reactivation of telomeres. According to Maria Blasco, research on these protective capsules are only just beginning and many tracks are already promising:

"One of them is about activation, because of its potential to reverse the aging process. And show what diseases can be controlled through the activation of telomeres in order to do drugs. "

Of course, she recalled that the lengthening of telomeres, and the possible reversal of the aging process, do not open the doors of immortality, although researchers from the laboratory of Maria Blasco are able to extend by 40% life of a mouse ...



Photo: Brazil's Maria Gomez Valentim to 114 years, May 19 2011.REUTERS/Ana Carolina Fernandes