Looking around at a 20th high school reunion, you might notice something puzzling about your classmates. Although they were all born within months of each other, these 38-year-olds appear to be aging at different rates.
Indeed they are, say the leaders of a large long-term human health study in New Zealand that has sought clues to the aging process in young adults.
In a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team introduces a panel of 18 biological measures that may be combined to determine whether people are aging faster or slower than their peers.
The data come from the Dunedin Study, a landmark longitudinal study that has tracked more than a thousand people born in 1972-73 in the same town from birth to the present. Health measures like blood pressure and liver function have been taken regularly, along with interviews and other assessments.
