Can the speed at which your DNA mutates reveal your risk of age-related diseases or even how long you’ll live?
Backed by $3.5 million from the NIH, scientists from Case Western and NYU are teaming up to explore this mystery using cutting-edge genome sequencing across large populations.
DNA Mutations: A Hidden Driver of Aging?
Every day of our lives, tiny changes, called genetic mutations, quietly appear in the DNA of our cells. These changes are a natural part of life and have long been linked to the aging process. But what if the speed at which these mutations pile up could actually predict how long we live—or how likely we are to face diseases like cancer?
That’s the exciting mystery a team of top scientists is now trying to solve.
A $3.5M Quest to Decode Aging
Backed by a $3.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, surgeon-scientist Jonathan Shoag from Case Western Reserve and physician-scientist Gilad Evrony from NYU are leading a groundbreaking research project that could reshape our understanding of aging.
Using powerful new DNA sequencing technology, their team will study a large and diverse group of people to track how genetic mutations develop over a lifetime—and how these patterns might be linked to age-related diseases. The goal? To uncover early warning signs and maybe even find ways to prevent these illnesses before they start.
Toward Predictive and Preventive Aging Medicine
“Our study will help us understand healthy aging and define new predictors for aging-related diseases,” Shoag said. “This has the potential to allow us to try to prevent aging-associated diseases sooner with clinical interventions.”
“Much remains unknown about how DNA mutations affect the fundamental process of aging, because only recently have the technologies become available to detect these changes in DNA,” Evrony said. “Studying aging-related mutations on a large scale will reveal how our genome dynamically changes throughout our lives.”
Shoag and Evrony are also part of the NIH Somatic Mosaicism across Human Tissues consortium, a multi-institutional effort designed to develop technologies to understand these mutations across the body.
Never miss a breakthrough: Join the SciTechDaily newsletter.
Follow us on Google and Google News.
3 Comments
Amazing, ineligible for any research grant money myself as a lone lay victim/investigator, some forty-two years after I stumbled onto the reason for aging these researchers are getting a $3.5 million grant to study what I’ve been sharing free-of-charge for the past eighteen years, starting with the FDA (with replies) in October of 2005, gradually and intermittently expanded and updated since.
As “…a board-eligible urologist-scientist specializing in the study, diagnosis and surgical treatment of prostate cancer…” Dr. Shoag is almost ideally positioned to confirm my lay findings: high blood serum levels of uric acid and acidic urine resultant of long-term inherited/acquired nearly subclinical non-IgE-mediated food allergy reactions aggravated (or not) with FDA approved food poisoning (e.g., added MSG, minimally). As applied to “…genetics and to help solve diagnostic mysteries in neurology and psychiatry…” Dr. Evrony is well situated to investigate my lay finding that acidic blood/body fluids erode the myelin sheaths of brain and nerve cells to contribute to aging and brain disorders, like dementia (e.g., some fatal family and temporary personal history).
Now eighty years of age and, sadly, too slow a lay learner to save most of them, I’m now the longest lived of my immediate family. And, for at least a while in 2024, I’m still available for consultation, free-of-charge. It’s the ‘lucid’ thing to do.
References?
Thanks for the inquiry, Paul. Subjectively, I aged about twenty years and mostly recovered from it between early 1980 and late 1981. Due to the unavailability of research grant money after I was already ill and suffering financially, with my doctors still ignorant of my kind of food allergies and FDA approved food poisoning, I discovered the uric acid/calcium connection online following at-home dietary experiments throughout most of 2010. With a family history of dementia and chronic high blood serum levels of uric acid I only ‘postulate’ the erosion of the myelin sheaths. As to real documented sources, try the “About” page of my video channel: https://odysee.com/@charlesgshaver:d?view=about