Testing for mortality: A way to measure our bodies' risk of disease

The moment will come, we know, when we're whisked off life's stage.

But when? It's a mystery that has haunted humans since the dawn of civilization. If it's soon, we can cancel that dental appointment, quit the job and take a dream vacation. If not, plan for decades of decrepitude.

For me, a clue -- perhaps -- arrived in my e-mail from a Menlo Park company, Telomere Diagnostics. Its tests measure the length of a protective cap at the end of each strand of DNA, the genetic blueprint of life. These caps are called telomeres, and mine are shrinking right now. So are yours. Every time a cell divides, the telomeres shorten. Their shrinking serves as a kind of clock that counts off a cell's life span. They tell us: Time's running out.

These tiny telomeres are so important to human biology that their discovery earned three American scientists the 2009 Nobel Prize.

So I leapt at the chance to have my telomeres measured -- and get paid $50 per test -- in Telomere Diagnostics' yearlong study to identify normal telomere lengths and rates of change. A telomere test is not yet -- and will likely never be -- life's crystal ball. There are other theories to explain aging, such as damaged cell membranes and mutated DNA.

But a fast-growing body of research is finding that telomere length in leukocytes, the white blood cells of the immune system, reliably predicts age-related disease -- and can be affected by genetics, chronic stress and health behaviors, such as exercise and diet.

Since then, several testing companies have been founded by respected scientists, such as Nobel laureate Elizabeth Blackburn of UC San Francisco and George M. Church, director of Harvard University's Molecular Technology Group.

They're part of the flourishing fields of retail genomics and personalized medicine, drawing on tools built for the Human Genome Project, where companies like Mountain View-based 23andMe offer a tour of your genes. The proliferation of these "lab developed tests," with companies marketing complex automated assays originally intended only for research purposes, is a growing concern among federal regulators.

The promise, though, is irresistible: For the first time in humanity's long search for immortality, it's possible to see how our cells are holding up against the ravages of time. Telomere science is inching us closer toward Weirdsville, where a simple blood test, not gray hair and creaky joints, measures aging.

"Telomere length is a biomarker of overall health status," according to the research consent form, "and thought to reflect physiological age ... It is an 'integrator' of a broad range of current and lifelong factors that impact health, including genetics, diet, fitness, toxins and chronic stress."

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Testing for mortality: A way to measure our bodies' risk of disease