TruDiagnostic Founder Ryan Smith on personalized testing, disease risk prediction and how lifestyle choices can rewrite your health future.
Longevity Technology recently launched FLT, our new line of supplements focused on longevity, cognition and muscle health. Being able to measure and track your biological progress goes hand-in-hand with effective supplementation – after all, you can’t improve what you don’t measure. Therefore, we are delighted to be partnering with TruDiagnostic to bring their epigenetic test kits to our customers. These state-of-the-art tests, developed in concert with scientists at Cornell, Yale and Harvard, can track how fast you’re aging and how your nutritional and biological systems are performing, allowing you to make targeted improvements over time.
Our range of epigenetic tests includes:
TruAge, which determines your biological age by analyzing over 75 biomarkers to assess cellular health and aging speed.
TruHealth, offering insights into nutritional status by evaluating more than 110 epigenetic biomarker proxies (EBPs) for vitamins, minerals, amino acids and antioxidants.
TruAge + TruHealth Bundle, combining both assessments for a comprehensive view of your biological age and nutritional health.
Longevity.Technology: Measuring epigenetic change can play a key role in helping to shape health journeys. At Longevity Technology, our mission really is to equip people with the tools and knowledge they need to optimize their healthspan; we want to help people explore their biological age – and take personalized, actionable steps to improve it – and our partnership with TruDiagnostic is a significant step in that direction. We sat down with Ryan Smith, Founder and Global Head of Research at TruDiagnostic to find out how TruDiagnostic is empowering people to measure and understand their biological age and the broader impact of their lifestyle choices on their health.
Ryan Smith on…
Leveraging the software
Epigenetics is very similar to genetics, but ‘epi’ means ‘above’, so above the genome – changeable patterns of expression and gene expression. DNA might be the hardware, but epigenetics is the software that’s running your body, telling your body what to do, and what patterns and what processes to turn on. With DNA methylation in particular, that’s an off switch, and that’s what we specialize in measuring. There are many ways to measure biological age, and when you are figuring out what platform is right for you, it’s important to look at data. TruDiagnostic does this pretty well – we probably have more publications on DNA methylation, and particularly these biological aging clocks, than anyone else in this space. And we’re really good at creating algorithms that are very predictive of long-term outcomes, and that’s what we want in a clock. We want to be able to assess where we are now so we can use it to predict outcomes and hopefully make changes that improve our health.
Taking control
One of questions we’re still elucidating and trying to get better at is how is biological age influenced by genetic factors versus lifestyle choices. As the algorithms get better, we are seeing that generally lifestyle has more of an impact. Even with some of the first clocks that were created, such as Steve Horvath’s clocks from 2013, the results showed some initial heritabilities were in the 40%, meaning that 40% might be more genetic-influenced and 60% being more lifestyle, nutrition and all the things we do on a day-to-day basis. But now with some of the newer algorithms, that heritable number is even lower, more nurture less nature, giving us the ability to impact our own health a lot more. That’s a huge asset because it puts control back into our hands; so long as we can get a good baseline of where we’re at, we can really then start to make changes for the better. And a lot of those changes are in things we can do on a daily basis. That’s the other thing about epigenetics – it’s not just about medications or some of these things that are accessible only through a physician. You can make changes to your diet, your sleep schedule, your physical activity schedule, and all of these changes can actually be seen and can impact the biological ways of life.
In some of our new testing, we can actually quantify the individual nutrient levels of things like vitamin D or alpha-ketoglutarate or creatine or some of these things that have been noted in longevity-specific compounds. With epigenetics, we can actually quantify those directly, meaning we can see where you’re at within these pathway, see your nicotinamide riboside downstream metabolites and say whether you’re not getting enough nicotinamide riboside – or getting too much.
Optimizing longevity
The one big takeaway is that epigenetics is absolutely influenced by your diet and lifestyle factors. And the outputs we can read on that are not just in the biological age category, but even quantifying those factors. We’re going to start to learn a lot more about what are the best combinations. And with the combination of both of these outputs, we think we can really influence the way we do personalized nutrition.
My vision is certainly a lofty one – I think that DNA methylation might end up even overpassing traditional blood-based biomarker testing because of the large scope that you can get with an easily accessible few drops of blood with a blood spot card. We can report on over 1,700 different proteins, metabolites and clinical values. We’ve shown that of those, we have a 90% accuracy within the clinical range, but the epigenetic proxies are actually more predictive of disease outcomes even than the regular biomarkers. So I think that the larger impact of DNA methylation algorithms to this space will be large scale implementation at low cost with lots of data available. And I think specifically in the field of aging, we can use all of that data to help validate what works and what doesn’t – we’ll get an actual blueprint of the best thing to do for each of us to optimize our longevity.
But I think that probably the thing I’m most excited about at TruDiagnostic is adding also disease-specific risk predictors. So we can do things like predicting the risk of Alzheimer’s, the risk of frailty related metrics, and really almost any disease and chronic disease. And so now in addition to biological aging, in addition to testing metabolites and nutritional variables, we can also then predict your risk of developing these different disease outcomes, which are also changeable and mitigatable – we can actually influence change and improvement.
We’re really the only company out there that has what we call ‘generation explainable plans’. They don’t just tell you your age, they don’t tell you if you’re older or younger, but they tell you why. And that’s really important to establish the best protocols to reverse that process.
Photograph of Ryan Smith courtesy of TruDiagnostic