Testing for mortality: Why I measured my telomeres. Should you?

By Lisa M. Krieger lkrieger@mercurynews.com

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 test measures the length of a protective cap, called a telomere, at the end of each strand of DNA, the genetic blueprint of life.

My telomeres are shrinking right now. So are yours. Every time a cell divides, its telomeres shorten until they reach a critical length, and the cell dies. 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.

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Testing for mortality: Why I measured my telomeres. Should you?