What do people here think of this overview of biological clocks?
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I had been meaning to query this group about an issue I had with the Levine clock. I ran my numbers through twice. The first time, I disregarded the line about my actual age. It had the number 62 plugged into it already and i figured it was irrelevant. I submitted and my age came back as 49. The second time, when I ran the numbers through I entered my correct age, which is 70, and the result came back as 59. Iām curious why my numbers would change my biological age relative to my actual age.
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jakexb
#3
Iām trying to remember where I read Morgan Levine saying this, but it was something to the effect that in our current reality, a personās chronological age has such a huge statistical power in determining a personās biological age (when compared to biomarkers) that itās silly not to use it since itās so easy to get.
Now that might always be true in the future, but weāre not yet in a world where biological age can be truly untethered from chronological age. Youāre really looking at a +/- around your chronological age and that comes from the biomarkers.
Also itās important to remember that these biological ages arenāt measuring a single physical reality or literal thing that exists in your biology. There is no actual thing called biological age that can be measured. Itās not a biomarker of its own, itās sort of a meta-score, kind of like a credit score that takes a bunch of factors and tries to merge them into a single useful number for ease of consumption. The credit score doesnāt really measure any literal thing, its just sort of a āvibeā of someoneās overall credit worthiness by smushing a bunch of literal numbers into one single frankenstein number.
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Perhaps a naive question here. But how does one go about doing these tests mentioned in the article?
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KarlT
#6
Are the clocks really of any use? I donāt see the value. Many of the values can be manipulated to change your age.
Do any of them take into account cardiovascular disease, dementia, or cancer risk?
I guess my point is, if your age is 65, and the test clock say 45, does that help you if youāre diagnosed with cancer the next day?
Do everything you can to be healthy and go from there?
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At some level it seems they are conveying probability of death or illness. If you had that on an organ by organ basis, perhaps it would be helpful in terms of prioritization of things we need to be working on. But I agree - I donāt think we are there yet.
Yes Karlā¦ itās a mixed bag for sureā¦ in my using TruMe Lab and GlycanAge, I benefit from seeing the consistency in the test repetitionā¦ and if I make a big changeā¦ in my caseā¦ upping my rapamycin dose six times (6 mg to 36 mg range).
The value was seeing something changed in a bad way in two very different biomarkers. Making an adjustment and retest and see.
I feel strongly that my multiple testing helped me see the negative in my high rapamycin dose. And, then making an adjustment to lower dose showed, as would be expected, a return to better biological numbers.
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Thatās probably the best use of an epigenetic age test I have seen. Also when I started Rapamycin, my epigenetic age decreased 7 years. So it seems that was the right choice.
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New Cardiovascular biological age clock:
Given the importance of cardiovascular health for a long, healthy life, this seems like something we might all be interested in.
Deep Learning to Estimate Biological Age From Chest Radiographs
Cardiovascular Imaging Research Center, Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Objectives
The goal of this study was to assess whether a deep learning estimate of age from a chest radiograph image (CXR-Age) can predict longevity beyond chronological age.
Background
Chronological age is an imperfect measure of longevity. Biological age, a measure of overall health, may improve personalized care. This paper proposes a new way to estimate biological age using a convolutional neural network that takes as input a CXRimage and outputs a chest x-ray age (in years) as a measure of long-term mortality risk.
Chest x-rays are among the most common tests in medicine. A future implementation could compute CXR-Age from routine chest x-ray images, to give a better estimate of an individualās biological age. The advantage of framing risk as a biological age (e.g., biological age of 55 years with a chronological age of 60 years) is that it is easier to grasp for patients than risk score probabilities (5). Furthermore, substituting biological age measures for chronological age could improve the performance of existing risk scores (12). In this way, CXR-Age could help inform decisions about prevention, screening, and treatment.
Conclusions
Based on a CXR image, CXR-Age predicted long-term all-cause and cardiovascular mortality.
To encourage reproducible research, the CXR-Age model will be released as free open-source software on Github (see link below):
Open Access paper:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1936878X21000681
Relacionado:
Chest radiography as a biomarker of ageing: artificial intelligence-based, multi-institutional model development and validation in Japan
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanhl/article/PIIS2666-7568(23)00133-2/fulltext
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I used a local Hong Kong Epigenetic Age testing company that was recommended by Richard at Modern Healthspan. Iām not sure which one they use.
In my opinion, epigenetic age tests are not very accurate.
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Ah. I found the info. The company is called Epi-age
email: info@epi-age.com
Itās based here in Hong Kong.
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Neo
#15
Thanks. I liked quickly only so I might have missed it on the webpage, but if you are going to use them again Iād try and find what patient populations/databases they have trained their algorithms on and ideally see that they have published on their clock(s) in good peer review journals. Otherwise itās probably better to use one(s) that has those things established.
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KarlT
#16
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ng0rge
#17
NOVOS Launches Free AI-based Biological Age Test; Most Accurate on Market to Date
Just ran across this. Looks to be App based. Guess Iāll try it out. Thought Iād check for feedback here. Anybody heard of it?
https://insider.fitt.co/press-release/novos-launches-free-ai-based-biological-age-test-most-accurate-on-market-to-date/
https://novoslabs.com/free-biological-age-test/
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Anybody see Karl Pflegerās test of 4 aging clocks? This was posted by Killian Farmer on the Rapamycin Facebook group.
Long thread. Hereās the entire text.
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ng0rge
#19
Thanks, reading the whole thread/text was very interesting and useful. The clocks are getting better with each new generation. DunedinPace (used by TruDiagnostic) is the only 3rd generation as far as I know. Donāt know much about Elysium. From Pfleger:
"Summary take-homes:
The opacity of Elysiumās test & participation in the community from the TruDiagnostic team plus their openness about whose clocks they are licensing makes me trust them a bit more, but the oddities in all this makes me not trust any particular # very much.
And Iām not sure how to value GlycanAge vs the methylation based clocks. Iāve heard it claimed that it mostly measures inflammation. Supposedly they will have a way to diagnose menopause with it coming. But otherwise, not sure what to do with GlycanAge estimates when they differ substantially from DNAm ones."
āToo bad @WyssCoray labās recent proteomic systems clocks (being commercially developed by TealOmics) isnāt avail to consumers, at least for now.ā
With the wide variation in the results from the different tests itās too bad he didnāt offer any analysis or insight on which might be more accurate (or is there really no way to know, even in the scientific community, with more extensive and expensive lab tests?).
I also have high hopes that the Teal Omics clock will be better (4th gen?).
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ng0rge
#20
Just set up an account with Novos and looked at the App - Novos Life. Looks like junkā¦asks a bunch of stupid questions, like how much money you make and how many rooms in your house, to figure out your biological age. And you canāt enter a birth date before 1970. I deleted it.
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