Current Issue (Vol 61, No. 2 | July, 2026)

Chronological age has long served as the primary framework through which medicine and society understand ageing. The number of years lived determines retirement, disease screening protocols, insurance structures, and assumptions regarding physiological decline. Yet the human body frequently resists such chronological simplicity. Individuals born in the same year often display remarkably different levels of physical resilience, immune competence, metabolic health, and disease susceptibility. Some remain physiologically robust into later life, while others experience premature frailty and chronic illness decades earlier. Such differences reveal a crucial distinction between chronological age and biological age, with the latter reflecting the actual functional state of the body rather than the simple passage of time. In recent years, telomere biology has emerged as one of the most prominent molecular indicators proposed to capture this distinction. Telomeres provide insight into how environmental conditions, lifestyle patterns, psychosocial stress, and cumulative life experiences influence cellular ageing over time. Thus, it challenges the assumption that ageing progresses uniformly across all individuals and populations (Vaiserman and Krasnienkov, 2021).