Professor Andrea Meyer

Absolutely.

Thank you for having me.

Physical activity is very important, and now we can measure it and express it as the biological age, yes.

Yes, so we have many epigenetic clocks, so we can measure, based on the epigenetic makeup, lots of markers.

Very often, we are using clocks which either are trained to predict mortality or diseases, and what we were able to find, if somebody has more steps,

it's very likely that that person, these individuals, also have a biologically younger age using the Horvath clock and the Grimm age clock.

So these are two clocks which are very often being used and have been trained in many participants and we were able to showcase the association with steps.

However, other clocks did not showcase that.

Yes, and that's a little bit difficult because we had to standardize all these cohorts.

And because everybody looked at physical activity a little bit differently, so what we were only able to showcase is that there is an association.

It's a strong association.

It's statistically significant, but we were not able to showcase of how many steps

associated with what kind of not even change, because I'm talking about cross-sectional studies, which only means that if people are being more active, that they have a lower biological age.

Yes, absolutely.

Because there are lots of confounding factors, we call them.

Because people who have more steps, it might be that they are more health conscious, that they have a better diet, that they have better sleep, that they're caring about their health.

They do preventative measures and they always have a lower biological age.

Absolutely.

So out of cross-sectional studies, we call them, we cannot actually refer to any causality.

Oh, yes.