How old are you? We all know the answer, even if we don’t always tell the truth. But is our biological age the same as our chronological age? One man claims that he can find out.
Dr Michael Roizen, an American doctor, has identified 78 “key behaviours and clinical indicators” which, he says, reveal how fast our bodies age. His RealAge technique will soon be available in Britain.
Roizen, who is 55 but insists that he is really 39, tests patients’ physical health and asks them to answer health and lifestyle questions. By assigning numerical values to each indicator, he calculates their “real age”. At a coronary- inducing £1,500 a go, RealAge sounds like another over-priced US health and fitness fad, the chronological equivalent of Bikram yoga. But more than four million Americans have taken the test. To find out what well-heeled British patients can expect when the programme is launched here, I headed for the University of Chicago Hospital.
The ER fan in me was disappointed when I arrived last week. The hospital, in the Hyde Park district of the city, is more like a Ritz Carlton hotel than a high-drama emergency room and Roizen is no Dr Kovac. “Fill in this questionnaire,” he drawls as he greets me, and hands over a folder the size of a small novel. “Then we will take blood and urine, give you stress tests, a heart scan, a fitness test, a lung capacity assessment and a dermatological examination. It says here that you are 36. By the end I will know how old you really are.”
The survey has all the usual questions about booze, burgers, fags and family history, but Roizen wants to know much more. How many friends do I have? How often do I see them? How frequently do I have sex? Am I monogamous? Do I “use commercial sex workers”? Do I like Krispy Kreme doughnuts? Am I a cocaine user? Do I talk on the phone while driving? How often do I floss my teeth? Once the 132-question survey is completed and e-mailed to a hospital in Syracuse, New York, for analysis, I lie on a couch while gallons of blood, or so it seems, are taken from my arm. I then head off for a quick-fire series of tests for blood pressure, gum disease, skin cancer, hearing and allergies. Changing into shorts and running shoes, I do press-ups and sit-ups in front of a nutritionist from Utah, a Mormon who lectures me on the evils of wine, as I huff and puff.
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As I wait for the results of my heart analysis and stress test, I’m reminded of Deathclock.com, a website that claims to predict the date you will die based on age, smoking habits, state of mind and body fat. I had just convinced myself that I wasn’t going to die today when my cardiologist drops a bomb: “You have a non-specific intraventricular conduction delay.”
Faster than you can say “second opinion”, I’m in Roizen’s office to find out whether I face Tony Blair-style heart surgery. Roizen thumbs my test results, back from Syracuse, and announces: “You are off the chart.”
I’m not sure if this is good or bad news. It’s the former; with 11 per cent body fat, I am 4 per cent better than my target. My cholesterol is so low it’s “off the scale” and my fitness score is “excellent”. I am not as flexible as I might be, but Roizen isn’t worried. To be healthier, all I have to do is to eat more tomatoes and less red meat, stop the odd smoke and stretch more after exercise. Then he reaches for my heart scan results. He draws diagrams of the heart to explain that an intraventricular conduction delay occurs when the two chambers are not pumping blood as fast as they should be. “Check it out when you get home to London, but I’m sure it’s normal.”
So, if I’m not going to die, how old am I? “Your calendar age is 36,” he says solemnly, like a judge sentencing a prisoner. “Without the odd smoke, your biological age would have been 27 but the tobacco has cost you three years which means that, putting all the tests together, you are 30.6 years old.”
I walk out of the clinic feeling that all those evenings in the gym have been worth the effort. But is Roizen’s analysis accurate? Are his tests supported by independent epidemiological studies? I ask Dr Andrew Davis, the assistant professor of medicine at the University of Chicago Primary Care Group, who worked with Roizen for two years and is one of America’s leading preventive health doctors. “The RealAge technique tends to commodify health and suggests that if you ‘do this’ or ‘do that’ the years fall off,” Davis says. “It’s not perfect. We all age at different rates and it’s not a great idea to tell patients their biological age when it turns out to be older than their calendar age. But it is a useful tool which encourages people who would not otherwise think of preventive healthcare to do so.”
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Oddly, perhaps, Roizen agrees. “Cholesterol levels, blood pressure and such are just abstract numbers to most people,” he said. “Patients don’t relate them to real-world consequences. But telling them how old their habits and lifestyle choices make them — their ‘RealAge’ — makes a dramatic difference. RealAge really motivates patients to improve their health.”
Until now, the all-American obsession with youth has been about nip and tuck, popping pills and pumping iron. Roizen has come up with another — better — way to pursue the goal of everlasting youth. At least, that’s what the 36-year-old-going-on-30.6 in me tells me as I leave his clinic. And I’m sticking to it.
Act your RealAge