What Age Do NAD+ Levels Decline?
If you are the sort of person who has always taken control over your health, strength and fitness and want to be able to enjoy your lifestyle into your 50s, 60s and beyond, you’ve probably discovered that it’s also possible to proactively address some of the ways in which our cells lose performance as we age.
This is useful to know because it has an impact on how far you can comfortably run, how much weight you can bear and how well you recover after an injury – all the things that enable you to enjoy the active, high performance lifestyle you lead. But when should you actively do something about this? To answer this, we need to understand how NAD+ levels decline as we age.
Cellular Performance Depends on NAD+
Everyday our cells rely on NAD+ to support vital cellular processes that maintain our health and without an adequate supply of NAD+, cellular damage begins to accumulate. A suboptimum supply of NAD+ means cells cannot function and drive the body as they once did. Furthermore, without the right supply of NAD+, cells won’t regenerate properly. So, it will feel like no matter how much training you do, there seems to be a limit to how much you can improve your performance – you just don’t have enough cellular processes to enable you to do more.
Unfortunately, it is known that the level of NAD+ found within your cells is massively influenced by your age, when you are young your body naturally makes and retains high levels of NAD+; but as you age the amount of NAD+ in your body drops significantly. This decline in NAD+ is a problem because of the important role NAD+ plays in producing cellular energy and repairing and maintaining our cells. Less NAD+ means we have less cellular energy, maintenance and repair. This results in an increase in cellular damage which leads to the symptoms of aging - decreased energy, damaged tissue, loss of optimal function.
At what age does NAD+ decline?
It is estimated that NAD+ levels decline by around 50% every 20 years. To put this into perspective, by age 50 a typical person may only have half the NAD+ that they had when they were young, and by aged 80 their NAD+ levels will have dropped to less than 10% of what they had in youth.
Whilst your NAD+ levels decline from the day you are born, the effects of low NAD+ generally become noticeable around age 30 to 40, which by no coincidence correlates with the first signs of aging, such as the appearance of wrinkles, or longer recovery times after a tough gym session.
This fall in NAD+ has been measured in many tissues including brain, skin, muscle and blood plasma. This means our cellular performance throughout our body will not be what we experienced in our 20s and 30s; our energy levels are lower, our recovery time is longer and our cognitive function is slower.
Is it possible to slow the decline in NAD+?
Yes. While NAD+ decline due to age is inevitable, the rate at which your NAD+ levels decline is heavily influenced by your lifestyle. A poor diet and lack of exercise are both known to decrease the natural production of NAD+, whilst exposure to DNA damaging agents such as UV rays from the sun and cigarette smoke require large amounts of NAD+ to repair the damage they cause.
There has also been an extensive amount of scientific research into ways to slow the decline in NAD+. In fact, there are a number of drug discovery research programs in place across the world. From this research a number of compounds have been identified as having the ability to tackle NAD+ levels from different angles within the biological systems that influence NAD+ production. Some of these compounds can be extracted from natural ingredients and can help the body to boost NAD+ levels in line with its natural biology.