Excerpt from the interview:
https://joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com/ ... itteldorf/...DataBETA is the Database for Epigenetic Evaluation of Treatments for Aging. We have a natural experiment out there. Millions of people trying to extend their life expectancy using a variety of strategies–medications, diets, exercise, in different combinations. If this were ten years ago, we’d ask, How can we know what is working? We’ll have to wait decades for enough people to die that we can count them and know which groups are succeeding in lowering their mortality risk."
"The idea for DataBETA is to recruit 5,000 people with 5,000 different strategies, recruiting for great diversity. Measure methylation ages at the beginning, middle, and end of a two-year period. See which are aging faster, which are aging slower. Is there a sub-population that is aging backward, getting younger over the course of the study? Look for the people who are doing best, and then look for commonalities.
What combination of strategies characterize the people who are most successful at slowing or turning back the clock? The easy part is going to be collecting data, and the hard part will be making sense of it. Maybe there will be a signal buried in the noise, and my hope is that we will be able to use statistical methods to disentangle all these interacting effects.
If we can find a common theme among the people who are most successful in slowing or reversing aging, then we’ll have an idea what combination of strategies is likely to work.