A Child's blood and DNA?
Can a blood test be done to determine wither or not a victim is a child or an adult? Does a child own a different amount of some blood cell or chemical that differs from an adult?
Answers:
You could test the blood for specific levels of testosterone and estrogen, as all right as growth hormone and probably others as well. Of course any chemical in the blood is going to vary within concentration from one person to the next, and in some conditions may be anomalous in concentration. So it would still be a best-guess.
Speaking of DNA if you had a sample of non-terminal tissue and you needed to sequence it you could look at the telomeres, which decrease with the age of the cell.
It is actually thoroughly difficult to tell how exactly old someone is medically.
A DNA test would report to you nothing about age, because our genetic code doesn't really change.
You might be capable of tell if they had been through puberty by how much testosterone and estrogen is contained by the blood.
A really small baby might have a few more stem cells.
There would be no reliable approach to tell the blood of, say, a 13 year old from that of an 18 year prehistoric.
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Answers:
You could test the blood for specific levels of testosterone and estrogen, as all right as growth hormone and probably others as well. Of course any chemical in the blood is going to vary within concentration from one person to the next, and in some conditions may be anomalous in concentration. So it would still be a best-guess.
Speaking of DNA if you had a sample of non-terminal tissue and you needed to sequence it you could look at the telomeres, which decrease with the age of the cell.
It is actually thoroughly difficult to tell how exactly old someone is medically.
A DNA test would report to you nothing about age, because our genetic code doesn't really change.
You might be capable of tell if they had been through puberty by how much testosterone and estrogen is contained by the blood.
A really small baby might have a few more stem cells.
There would be no reliable approach to tell the blood of, say, a 13 year old from that of an 18 year prehistoric.
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