August 25, 2021- Lexington, KY – Today, TruDiagnostic released a new report expansion for TruAge, their epigenetic testing service. This expansion gives an accurate estimation of telomere length, based on methylation.

Telomeres are repeating sequences of nucleotide base-pairs at the very end of all your chromosomes. They act as end-caps to protect genetic information, and they shorten each time a cell divides. Once a cell’s telomeres reach their shortest length, the cell stops replicating. 

Cell replication is necessary for healing and growing, so this process of telomere shortening and halting is widely accepted to be one of several factors causing tissues to age. 

What happens to your cells at the end of their lifespan, and how quickly they arrive at that end, is an important indicator of the aging process and a predictor of many diseases. People with significantly shorter telomeres are three times more likely to die from heart disease, and eight times more likely to die from infections disease, (M. Shammas, 2011). Therefore, tracking the rate of telomere shortening is critical to tracking the overall progression of health and aging. 

Due to a strong link between DNA Methylation, a type of epigenetic marker, TruDiagnostic can now offer telomere insights calculated from the robust methylation data set collected during their standard TruAge test. 

“Telomere length has long been a biomarker of aging.” Said Ryan Smith, Vice President of Business Development for TruDiagnostic. “In addition to being an established hallmark of aging, it can drive other hallmarks of aging as well such as senescence.  While we believe epigenetic age clocks still might have more application in establishing biological age, telomere length is still a fundamental process linked to aging and is worth measuring.  We have used some of our private datasets to create this accurate prediction method but look forward to publishing our validation of this algorithm using publicly available dataset soon.”

In this new report expansion, TruDiagnostic’s private epigenetic testing laboratory offers several insights into Telomere status. 

These insights include: 

This expansion is another step in TruDiagnostic’s push to become the leading provider of epigenetic testing, for both public consumers and academic research.