News

Healthy Diet Is Linked With a Slower Pace of Aging, Reduced Dementia Risk
March 14, 2024

Calorie Restriction Slows Pace of Aging in Healthy Adults
Calorie restriction, a proven intervention to slow aging in animals, showed evidence of slowing the pace of biological aging in a human randomized trial
February 9, 2023

Researchers Seek to Answer a Fundamental Question: What Is Health?
November 29, 2022

Epidemiologists Develop State-of-the-Art Tool for Measuring Pace of Aging
DunedinPACE reveals wide range of population aging rates and can predict future disease and mortality
January 18, 2022

New Tool Measures the Pace of Aging Across the Life Course
The tool developed by epidemiologists functions as a speedometer, recording how fast the subject is aging
May 5, 2020

In the Media

THE HINDU

Geroscience: The Science Related to Aging
April 13, 2024— Dr. Daniel Belsky, an epidemiologist at Columbia University, has coined the term ‘geroscience’, meaning geriatric, or related to age. Here, he has devised a novel blood test which determines the pace at which a person is aging. His group has devised a method which studies the formation of methyl groups through an enzyme in the DNA of senior citizens and finds that this methylation is sensitive to aging. This is often referred to as ‘gerozyme’. Several groups are working on drugs and other related methods to modulate the gerozyme, and how these efforts affect his/her aging. Dr. Belsky’s group had also studied the levels of DNA methylation in people across the socio-economical background (poor-rich, rural-urban) and finds that socio-economic disadvantage has a role to play.

U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT

Eating Healthy Slows 'Aging Clock,' Helping to Shield Your Brain From Dementia
March 15, 2024 — ... “Much attention to nutrition in dementia research focuses on the way specific nutrients affect the brain,” said study senior author Daniel Belsky, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Columbia School of Public Health and the Columbia Aging Center. “We tested the hypothesis that healthy diet protects against dementia by slowing down the body’s overall pace of biological aging," Belskyexplained in a Columbia news release. The researchers were able to track cellular aging in participants using an "epigenetic clock" called DunedinPACE. It was developed by Belsky and other researchers while he was at Duke University. According to Belsky, DunedinPACE is “like a speedometer for the biological processes of aging," tracking them as they work on the body over time.

FORBES

You Can Slow Down Your Biological Clock By Staying In School, Study Finds
March 1, 2024— The latest report, by researchers at Columbia University, is the first to connect educational mobility with the pace of biological aging. “We found that upward educational mobility was associated both with a slower pace of aging and decreased risk of death,” said Gloria Graf, a PhD candidate in Columbia’s Department of Epidemiology and co-author of the study. “Our findings support the hypothesis that interventions to promote educational attainment will slow the pace of biological aging and promote longevity”…”Although the findings were consistent, experimental evidence is needed to confirm them, said Daniel Belsky, associate professor of epidemiology at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health and the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center and senior author of the paper. “Epigenetic clocks like DunedinPACE have potential to enhance such experimental studies by providing an outcome that can reflect impacts of education on healthy aging well before the onset of disease and disability in later life,” Belsky added.

THE SCIENTIST

Your Partner's Genome May Affect Your Health

Jan 5, 2021— While it’s hard to draw conclusions about individual traits from this kind of broad analysis, the team’s study represents a proof of concept that indirect genetic effects may be important in humans, says Daniel Belsky, an epidemiologist at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health who was not involved in the work. He calls it a “creative application of a large and powerful database to address an important and open question in behavioral genetics.” Belsky adds that while the results “seem broadly sensible,” there remain some questions for future studies regarding the extent to which indirect genetic effects can be distinguished from assortative mating. “The design that [the authors] use is quite strong in controlling for assortment on the trait under analysis,” he notes, but it’s less effective “for controlling for assortment on traits that are genetically correlated with the trait under analysis but which may not be measured.”

Browse Our Publications

Watch Our Talks

Belsky Lab

News

In the Media