For many people, aging feels like it happens in stops and starts. After a period of smooth sailing, one day, seemingly out of the blue, you have achy knees.
“You wake up in the morning and you suddenly feel old,” said Dr. Steve Hoffmann, a computational biology professor at the Leibniz Institute on Aging in Jena, Germany. “That’s sort of the takeaway.”
It turns out there may be a scientific basis for this experience. By analyzing age-related markers, such as proteins and DNA tags in the bloodstream, some scientists are coming to understand that aging in adulthood is not a linear process, but perhaps one that jumps dramatically at certain points in one’s life.
