Personal Science Week - 241205 Bio Age

Testing biological age

How old are you really? Sure, there’s your chronological age, which measures the number of times earth has revolved around the sun since you were born. But what about people who obviously appear to age faster or slower than that?

This week we’ll summarize a few results from tests that measure biological age in an attempt to measure what really matters about aging.

Biological Age

You can’t do personal health testing these days without running into various commercial tests for “biological” age. There are many different ways to measure this, but all are based on the principle that your body contains some type of internal “clock” that counts down from birth according to some predictable, inevitable schedule. For example, each cell division comes with a certain number of mutations that are carried on to the next division. Each time your DNA is replicated, the telomeres (protective caps at the end of chromosomes) get a bit shorter. Measure the remaining length of the telomeres and you have a clock. Or so the theory.

My own experience with bio age tests is mixed. I’ve done several commercial bio age tests, some of which show me older than my chronological age, and some younger.

TruMe Labs, for example, took my tiny saliva sample and ran it through their machine to check for methylation on nine small DNA regions that its scientists think correspond closely to biological aging.

Function Health does something similar, but more indirectly, using blood parameters that are known to closely correlate with DNA methylation (and aging).

Other tests rely on statistical measures that compare you to all the other people in their database, across some machine learning dimension whose exact meaning can be difficult to describe. Viome, for example, has multiple samples of my gut microbiome (and blood and saliva) that they can compare to the million other samples they’ve collected. Because they know the self-reported chronological age of the other samples, an ML algorithm can be tuned to give a pretty close guess of the age of a new sample that has no self-reported age applied to it.

My own company, Opticare AI, takes a high-resolution photo of your eyes and compares it to a dataset of tens of millions of other retinal photos. In our testing of people of unknown ages, we find it scores too high about as often as it scores too low—with the average about equal to the person’s chronological age.

Another easy (and free) way to measure biological age is the simplest: look at a photo. Computers trained on zillions of age-labeled images can do a pretty good job guessing your age from an uploaded photo. How Old Do You Look will give you an answer immediately, along with tips for how to look younger.

I didn’t do a real head-to-head comparison; these tests are taken at various times over the past few years, so my results aren’t rigorous, but here’s what I’ve found:

A wide range of values for tests I’ve taken over the years. Because my chronological age was different for each test, the results aren’t directly comparable except as an indicator of how much higher or lower they were over actual age.

With the exception of Opticare (which I test daily, and find pretty consistent), I’ve only done one-shot tests. It would be much better to submit multiple identical samples to these companies on the same day to find how they compare. For extra credit, submit the wrong chronological age to see whether the test-makers “cheat” by peeking at your real age in order to hone their estimates.

Head-to-head testing

That’s exactly what longevity scientist and podcaster Matt Kaeberlein did recently. He purchased biological age tests from four popular companies and sent them identical samples on the same day. Because he registered two separate kits with each company, he’s also able to compare their consistency.

Tldr; the results are all over the place. Take enough tests and you’ll average out close to chronological age, but look at that high variance.

Watch his short YouTube (and subscribe to his excellent podcast), for all the details.

Conclusions

Standalone bio age tests are pretty expensive, generally $100-$200, for what you get. Many of these companies suggest you test regularly, especially before/after starting some healthy protocol, to see whether you’re on the right track. While it would be great to find some supplement or other therapeutic that “reverses aging”, my own testing and discussions with others makes me skeptical about the whole concept.

Intuitively we feel “biological age” is something where lower is better. I mean, who at age 60 wouldn’t want the body of a 20-year-old?

Or would you? There are 20-year-olds with poor skin, allergies, gut problems, and worse—not to mention the lack of wisdom that only comes with maturity. You don’t want to be younger—you want to have better skin, better eyesight, stronger muscles, more stamina, and many other aspects of health that needn’t depend strictly on age.

Bryan Johnson famously summarizes his motto as “don’t die”. For me, a better motto is: “Live well” — at any age.

Personal Science Links

Speaking of Bryan Johnson…

Matt Kaeberlein questions Bryan Johnson’s decision to give up on rapamycin. Johnson’s explanation is a misreading of outdated studies, so Kaeberlein wonders if there’s a different reason, one that might reveal deeper problems with the so-called “Blueprint”. Like Kaeberlein, I’m cautious about Johnson’s less-than-transparent methods behind his claims.

Meanwhile, Health Gurus of Hereticon compares Bryan Johnson’s “scientific” approach to health with “Raw Egg Nationalist”, the pseudonym of a guy with a more intuitive “Lindy” approach more attuned with ancient wisdom. Johnson thinks the whole point will be moot soon when computers are able to diagnose our health better than anyone.

A better example in transparency is Krinn, who after a year on a potassium experiment lost significantly more weight than you’d expect from exercise and diet changes alone.

Chronic disease patients and caregivers should check out Spooniverse, a new directory of resources for people suffering from chronic disease. By our friend Nita Jain.

Citizen Health is another patient advocacy and support group for people with rare diseases. They will help you collect all your medical records and put them in one place for easy access to your doctors as well as a network of researchers and others who can use your data to advance science. They recently raised $14.5M from Chan-Zuckerberg, so expect them to be around for a while.

SleepSpace is raising $40,000 with a Kickstarter campaign for a SmartSheet , specially made sheets and pillowcases that work with their sleep app. Since many sleep experts recommend against keeping a phone near your bed, I thought it was interesting that SleepSpace offers a refurbished (used) iPhone specially configured to keep you from distraction and EMF.

About Personal Science

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