Is it reliable? Responsive to CR?
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[they use the painless tasso, i still dont know if this is evaluated to be legit by 3rd parties
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But even when we focus on klotho and the role it plays in ageing, we rub against a common problem in biomedical research: what we’re using to look for klotho is not all that reliable. Antibodies are commonly used to detect a protein in the lab. The antibody is supposed to recognize a protein of interest (and only that protein). Once it is bound to it, it will be bound to by a second antibody that carries something visible or detectable, like a colour pigment or a fluorescent molecule. The issue is that many commercially available antibodies meant to be specific for one protein are revealed not to be, and tests done using an antibody from company A often do not match the same tests done using a similar antibody from company B, and antibodies sold for klotho detection have not escaped from this problem. Therefore, some of the knowledge we’ve acquired about where klotho is in the body and what happens to its levels in this or that condition may not be correct. More rigour is needed to vet the very tools used to study klotho.
That hurdle hasn’t stopped scientists from speculating about and, in some cases, testing actual therapies that involve increasing the levels of klotho in the body, often in laboratory animals. Here too, however, we face challenges. Simply ingesting the protein wouldn’t work, as our digestive enzymes would chop it up into its building blocks, to be used to assemble different proteins in our body. Injecting people with the protein would be of no value in trying to reach the brain, for example, because klotho is so big, it is not thought to be able to move through the blood-brain barrier, a sort of anatomical border control that limits which molecules and microorganisms can enter the brain and potentially harm it. Scientists are thus experimenting with gene therapy and with small molecules that can increase the natural production of klotho protein in the body.
The issue is that many commercially available antibodies meant to be specific for one protein are revealed not to be, and tests done using an antibody from company A often do not match the same tests done using a similar antibody from company B, and antibodies sold for klotho detection have not escaped from this problem. Therefore, some of the knowledge we’ve acquired about where klotho is in the body and what happens to its levels in this or that condition may not be correct. More rigour is needed to vet the very tools used to study klotho.
That hurdle hasn’t stopped scientists from speculating about and, in some cases, testing actual therapies that involve increasing the levels of klotho in the body, often in laboratory animals. Here too, however, we face challenges. Simply ingesting the protein wouldn’t work, as our digestive enzymes would chop it up into its building blocks, to be used to assemble different proteins in our body. Injecting people with the protein would be of no value in trying to reach the brain, for example, because klotho is so big, it is not thought to be able to move through the blood-brain barrier, a sort of anatomical border control that limits which molecules and microorganisms can enter the brain and potentially harm it. Scientists are thus experimenting with gene therapy and with small molecules that can increase the natural production of klotho protein in the body.
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I ordered the Klotho test from Longevitylabsolutions.com, but haven’t taken the test yet.
I also ordered a Jinfiniti Aging SOS Advanced panel that includes alpha-Klotho and my results from the blood draw on Jun-17-2024 came back recently and my Klotho number was 0.7ng/ml (Jinfiniti supplies a reference range of 5 - 30 ng/ml for youthful & healthy Klotho levels and anything under 3ng/ml listed as very deficient). Since most published results for alpha-Klotho have normal ranges of 0.8 - 2.0 ng/ml, I emailed Jinfiniti to find out why their normal ranges are so much higher : The founder She responded with:
" We use a very different assay and reference ranges are established by our own studies that have more subjects and with a variety of health conditions. Your Klotho is very low relative to what we see in most individuals. Low Klotho levels are usually associated with some health conditions in most individuals with very low Klotho. In your case, it may be related to diabetes, hypertension and related kidney suboptimal function.".
This confirms what AlexKChen quoted about antibody (ELISA) based Klotho tests not being very repeatable, so each ELISA panel may produce results that need to be scaled differently to estimate absolute ng/mL values, and those scaling factors are often wrong. So each test labs needs to generate their own reference ranges to interpret the Klotho test result.
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