Voisin tells me that calorie restriction can produce an epigenetic “signature” or biological age younger than a person’s chronological age. It is much less clear, she says, whether exercise could have a similar effect.
To find out, she and Eynon had their participants ride exercise bikes to exhaustion to gauge their “VO2 max”, or the maximum amount of oxygen they can use, peak power output, lactate threshold and levels of an enzyme called citrate synthase, a marker of efficient energy production. Each person was then assigned a fitness score and the researchers compared the fitter half to the less fit half.
Back in the boardroom, Voisin is poised to swing her laptop around and show me the results, which are being prepared for publication. I’m reminded of an art house auctioneer pulling back the curtain on a prize exhibit, and for connoisseurs of statistics the graph could well be a masterpiece.
On the left, a plot of the least fit people shows that their actual ages tally with their biological ages based on DNA methylation; the two are linked in a ladder of roughly horizontal lines. On the right, however, the ladder of the fitter people is wonky; their actual ages slope down in near uniform lines to their much lower biological ages – which are lower, on average, by four years.
“This is the first attempt to show that exercise can slow down aging at the epigenetic level,” said Voisin. The result, adds Eynon, is that exercise is setting up skeletal muscle to succeed.
Read the original full article – Mind and Muscles – How to Age Well
