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Posted By: Mike Kremer Blood Test Your Lifespan - 07/30/11 01:59 AM

Are you brave enough to pay for a Bloodtest that can predict how long you will live?
The test that reveals your Telomeres length.

Telomeres are the latest buzzword in medicine. These tiny things — they’re about one ten-millionth of a metre long — are the protective structures at the end of every single Chromosome in your body.
They are like the plastic cap at the end of a shoelace, preventing your DNA unravelling every time, your cells divide, or your Chromosomes need to replicate themselves.

But as we grow older our Telomeres grow shorter until they can no longer protect our DNA, then our Cells mutate and die.

Some people haveTelomeres shorter than average, others longer than average.
If you knew roughly how long you had to live, you might change your lifestyle, healthwise, or financial, to compensate according to your needs.
(Of course, you could also wish your parents had bequeathed you better genes — some of us are born with longer Telomeres than others)

Now you can do just that....
At the only one place in the world that offers a Telomere test to patients:
'Life Length', based in Madrid. The company was co-founded by Dr Maria Blasco, director of Spain’s respected and state-owned National Cancer Research Centre.
Dr Blasco, who runs the centre, is not the only scientist to have worked out how to measure telomeres, but she claims the method she has devised is uniquely precise and is able to identify the percentage of potentially dangerous short telomeres in a patient’s blood sample.
The fee? €500 (£450) — plus the cost of having your blood collected in Britain and couriered to Dr Blasco’s laboratory, will cost you a further £180.

http://english.ntdtv.com/ntdtv_en/news_e...blood-test.html

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/health/the-long-and-short-of-the-aging-process/454785

***Thoughts
Could this test upset Life Insurance Societies?
Might some secretly plan to change their lifestyle?
An advantage, or disadvantage to know your approx death?
Posted By: Bill Re: Blood Test Your Lifespan - 07/30/11 05:01 PM
I think before I throw money away on something like that I will wait and see just how much information they can actually get from that sort of thing. I figure that while the length of your telomeres may have some relation to how long you will live they won't give you enough information to make any real difference. The length of a life is subject to so much variation based on so many different factors that I figure at most the length of the telomeres would give you some sort of a maximum expected lifetime.

Bill Gill
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