We all know women live longer than men now, but the gap is narrowing as women's lifestyles are changing and becoming close to men's.

"Searching for meaningful markers of aging" - NYTimes, David Stipp, Jul 22, 2013.

"How fast are you aging?
Don't look to online calculators of "biological aging" for an answer. Those focus mainly on risk factors for diseases, and say little about normal aging, the slow mysterious process that turnchildren to codgers.

"In fact, scientists are still hunting for biological markers of that reliably register how fast the process is unfolding.
Seemingly obvious candidates won't do. Wrinkles, for example,
often have more to do with sun exposure than aging. Markers like age-related increases in blood pressure are similarly problematic, often confounded by factors unrelated to aging.

"The quest for truly revealing biomarkers of aging could tell us a lot about our current and future health. Tracking these indexes before and after starting a new diet or exercise progam,
for instance, might show you whether it was actually pushing off
your decline and fall. Aging-rate tests could help scientists evaluate possible anti-aging compounds in humans without prohibitively long studies.

"Experts on aging generally agree that acceptable biomarkers of aging should foretell the remaining life span of a middle-aged person more accurately than chronological age does. Further, they should offer a consistant picture of biological age, said Dr. Richard Miller a gerontologist at UM; "Do those 50-year olds
with the best retention of immune function also tend to have the least cataracts, good sense of smell, least osteoporosis, lowest blood pressure and best memory?"

"Earlier this year Dr. Zang and his collegues reported that a kind of molecular aging clock is embedded in our genomes whose speed can be measured via blood testing. The moving parts of the clock consists of chemical tags on DNA molecules that control whether genes are active in cells. The reseachers found that the patterns of tags, called epigenetic markers, predictably change with age.

"Collectively, these tags spell out a signature of age that is not largely changed by disease or ethnic background. Men appear to age on average 4 % faster than women, the scientists found,
which may largely explain why women's life expectancy exceeds men's by 6% worldwide. The clock also indicated that tumor cells of of cancer have aged, on the average, 40% more than normal cells taken from the same patients."

When we get the whole results of epigenom studies like these,
we may indeed get life expectancy of 100 and beyond. Let's get ready to get on that future bus by taking on the right lifestyles; exercises, right diet, and most of all, mental health.