This is a health competition for biological age reversal, similar to Bryan Johnson’s Rejuvenation Olympics. There’s a crowd sourced prize pool paid in crypto and entrants are using a biological age calculator PhenoAge based on common blood tests.
A reduction in biological age is associated with a decrease in all-cause mortality (ACM). Many of these are probably causative like inflammation and aging, or for CVD in humans. The PhenoAge calculator is modified so lower ALP doesn’t increase biological age despite ACM associated to decrease with further decreases according to other studies. Similar modification for RDW.
Imagine if ARPA-H is successful in creating a health (biological age) calculator that would be used for clinical use. Finding ways of improving that score and running large competitions would be natural result of that. But if anyone thinks this is a wrong way to go it or have other criticism I think it would be interesting to hear.
I think this is important because it incentivizes more people to share their methods of having blood tests and other biomarkers in optimal ranges, which we all would benefit from. Discuss.
Games indeed have the power to bring resources to the field of Longevity like nothing else. Creator of LWC here.
I started this project, because I am a huge fan of the Rejuvenation Olympics (for deeper philosophical reasons) but unfortunately I wasn’t able to properly get involved with that project and since I’m a seasoned software developer, I couldn’t unsee how much better that website can be built. So I launched my own competition.
But it’s not about me. I’m not any kind of software developer, but the FOSS kind: I write Free and Open Source Software for life! Thus the Longevity World Cup is also fully open source: GitHub - nopara73/LongevityWorldCup
All this is to say I’d love to have code contributions to the project, or you can even fork it and launch your own competition, I’ll be fully supporting you! If you have questions or suggestions about the structure of LWC, I’ll be also here to assist!
When I fist saw your website a few months ago I took a look and decided not to participate.
The only way for something like this to have any validity is;
same testing company for every participant - results do vary by lab on the exact same test
standardized labs - what is tested needs to be the same for every participant
test results auto-submitted via API from the lab to the website - so nothing can be fudged by the participant
open management process for the website so everyone has confidence there are no shenanigans
Without standards, the “competition” would be useless. That’s how all competitions work, rules, referees, judges, because standards work.
That’s why I like RO and participate in it, as it meets 3 of those 4 requirements. That is not to say RO can’t be improved, especially in how and who manages the website.
I trust the lab (Trudiagnostic) and the people who run it but I don’t fully trust the people who run the website.
At the moment I’m ranked 239 on RO and my wife Joan is ranked 95 out of ~9,000 participants
Great to see this effort - thanks for doing all this work. I loved the Rejuvenation Olympics also but don’t like the proprietary link to the expensive aging clock they use. All the clocks have some sort of issue right now, but phenoAge is a “reasonable” start in my opinion and more and better clocks will come along soon I think.
A mentioned on the website:
Acquire a 2025 blood test from which we can compute your biological age, called PhenoAge. You need the following biomarkers:
Albumin (also known as Serum Albumin)
Creatinine (sometimes called Serum Creatinine)
Glucose (also referred to as Blood Sugar)
C-Reactive Protein (CRP, also known as hs-CRP for high-sensitivity C-Reactive Protein)
Lymphocyte Percentage (may be labeled as Lymphocyte % or Absolute Lymphocyte Count)
Mean Corpuscular Volume (MCV, also called Average Red Blood Cell Size)
Red Cell Distribution Width (RDW, sometimes called RDW-CV or Red Blood Cell Size Variation)
Alkaline Phosphatase (ALP, also referred to as Alk Phos)
White Blood Cell Count (WBC Count, also called Leukocyte Count)
You can visit any lab for these tests — just pay the lab fee, which might even be covered by your healthcare provider. There are no hidden costs to participate in the competition, on the contrary: excelling could see you earn prize money and future sponsorship opportunities!
Albumin: No upper cap
Creatinine: Lower cap: 44 µmol/L
Glucose: Lower cap: 4.44 mmol/L
CRP: No lower cap
White Blood Cell Count (WBC): Lower cap: 3.5 × 1000 cells/µL
Lymphocytes: Upper cap: 60 %
Mean Corpuscular Volume (MCV): No lower cap
Red Cell Distribution Width (RDW): Lower cap: 11.4 %
Alkaline Phosphatase (AP): No lower cap
FTR I setup the competition so that it restarts every year with a different biological aging clock. As the field progresses we should have better and better ones.
Definitely. I originally setup the competition so every year a different biological aging clock will be used. I don’t expect us selecting another traditional lab based aging clock going forward. Although there are things to be said about their reliability, their lack of standardization introduces too much noise.
The larger vision is to delegate these epigenetic aging clocks to serve as qualifiers rather than to be the competition themselves. Then a second phase aof the competition could start where only the top 100 would be eligible to compete in and that’d require more rigorous measurements.
If things go really well financially for the competition, perhaps we could even fly the top 10 to a biohacking house in some parts of the world. Setup a bunch of cameras and get an army of doctors to measure them and release a Netflix episode or sth
Yes, right now the competition can be gamed in many ways.
As we discussed, from next year by switching to epigenetic tests we’re going to eliminate many of such ways.
Furthermore if the competition is successful, I’ll likely be able to convince the company providing the tests to cryptographically sign their reports, so we can validate they were not altered.
That being said it’ll still not be perfect as that’ll open the possibility for a person to still send in someone else’s blood to the lab, but overall it’ll still reduce the wiggle room.
There are other softwer measures being utilized here. At signup one must provide their picture and agree to do a video interview. Not sure how much this helps, but one’s affinity of cheating is reduced when they have to do it publicly.
If cheating is noticed among top competitors I also have in mind of making the competition invite only. I’d prefer to not do that, but until proper solutions are found this should suffice to ensure survival.
Ultimately the multi phase system will provide a final solution. Unless the athletes are being tested in person by the organizers some form of cheating will still be a possibility. I’m hopeful we’ll be able to eventually get there, as pointed out in my previous reply.
BTW I’m now a memeber and I can post more than 3 comments wooho!
The issue with this “world cup” is the same as with the levine formula more generally. For example Levine assumes higher albumin is always good. However, at times really high albumin can be bad. Similarly if you are fasting your albumin is likely to go down.
Hence if you wish to target a good score on Levine then you need to do things that are not necessarily the best things to do for longevity.
I do think Morgan Levine’s work in producing this formula is good, but people need to recognise that it is not perfect when it comes to using it as a target rather than a measurement.
