There’s a growing buzz around epigenetics. If you scroll through wellness blogs or talk to certain researchers, it can sound like methylation clocks and biological age scores are the next great medical breakthrough. But let’s pull back for a second.
Before you base decisions about your health on these trendy tests, it’s important to ask: What do we actually know? And how does that stack up to what we’ve proven about your genetic code itself?
Epigenetics is real. It’s also young. The field has only been studied in depth for a few decades, mostly post-2000s. That pales in comparison to germline genetics, which has been actively researched from Gregor Mendel’s era in the 19th century, through the sequencing of the human genome, to today’s DNA testing technologies.
This isn’t about dismissing epigenetics. It’s about understanding where the science currently stands. Germline genetics has built out detailed, clinically validated ways to understand disease risk directly from your DNA. That’s what drives Nucleus: we look at the entire genome using 99.9% analytically validated tests to identify real, actionable insights.
Epigenetic insights, such as biological age scores, may be intriguing — but they can mislead. You could have a methylation score that tells you you’re biologically 25, and feel awesome about that. But if you have a pathogenic variant that puts you at elevated risk for a serious condition and go undiagnosed, that biological age score won’t save you. Your genome might just hold critical, life-saving clues.
So yes, the frontier of “omics” is exciting — proteomics, epigenomics, and more. But don’t skip step one. First, you need to understand your genome. You quite literally come from your DNA. That’s the ground truth. From there, new technologies can enhance what we know — but they don’t replace what’s already proven.
In this post, I break down how we think about epigenetics at Nucleus, why whole genome testing is the foundation for any personalized medicine strategy, and how to critically evaluate the claims around newer diagnostics.