In an earlier post, I wrote about quantifying my biological age with aging.ai (https://michaellustgarten.com/2018/06/26/maximizing-health-and-lifespan-is-calorie-restriction-essential/). The importance of that post is illustrated by the finding that based on data from 13 blood tests between 2016 – 2019, my average biological age is 29.2y, which is ~33% younger than my chronological age.

On my quest for optimal health, I’m striving to get as accurate as possible when it comes to quantifying biological age. While the aging.ai biomarker set is strongly correlated with biologic age (r = 0.80), in 2018 two papers were published (Liu et al., Levine et al.) that introduced “Phenotypic Age”, which includes a combination of 9 circulating biomarkers + chronological age that is better at predicting biological age (r = 0.94) than aging.ai. It includes analytes that are found on the standard blood chemistry screen, including albumin, creatinine, glucose, lymphocyte %, mean corpuscular volume (MCV), red blood cell distribution width (RDW), alkaline phosphatase, white blood cells, and an analyte that is not found on that panel, C-reactive protein (CRP). In addition, chronological age is included as a covariate.

So what’s my biological age based on the Phenotypic Age calculator? When I input my data from my latest blood test measurement on 6/4/2019, I get a biological age of 35.39y, which is 23% lower than my chronological age of 46. Not bad!

To quantify your biological age with the Phenotypic Age calculator, input your data in the Excel file that is embedded within the first paragraph of the following link:

DNAmPhenoAge_gen (1)

If you’re interested, please have a look at my book!

References

Liu Z, Kuo PL, Horvath S, Crimmins E, Ferrucci L, Levine M. A new aging measure captures morbidity and mortality riskacross diverse subpopulations from NHANES IV: A cohort study. PLoS Med. 2018 Dec 31;15(12):e1002718. doi: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1002718.

Levine ME, Lu AT, Quach A, Chen BH, Assimes TL, Bandinelli S, Hou L, Baccarelli AA, Stewart JD, Li Y, Whitsel EA, Wilson JG, Reiner AP, Aviv A, Lohman K, Liu Y, Ferrucci L, Horvath S. An epigenetic biomarker of aging for lifespan and healthspan. Aging (Albany NY). 2018 Apr 18;10(4):573-591. doi: 10.18632/aging.101414.

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