This is the paper that came out of the research at Yale, that I covered in December 2023: Blood test can reveal if you are at risk from organs aging prematurely - #3 by RapAdmin
New paper (paywalled):
Aging occurs at different rates across individuals and physiological systems, but most epigenetic clocks provide a single age estimate, overlooking within-person variation. Here we developed systems-based DNA methylation clocks that measure aging in 11 distinct physiological systems—Heart, Lung, Kidney, Liver, Brain, Immune, Inflammatory, Blood, Musculoskeletal, Hormone and Metabolic—using data from a single blood draw. By integrating supervised and unsupervised machine learning with clinical biomarkers, functional assessments and mortality risk, we derived system-specific scores that outperformed existing global clocks in predicting relevant diseases and aging phenotypes. We also created a composite Systems Age score to capture overall multisystem aging. Clustering individuals based on these scores revealed distinct biological aging subtypes, each associated with unique patterns of health decline and disease risk. This framework enables a more granular and clinically relevant assessment of biological aging and may support personalized approaches to monitor and target system-specific aging processes.
https://archive.ph/OpZNg#selection-839.0-839.108
New Scientist Article:
A single blood test can reveal the biological ages of 11 different organs and bodily systems, potentially highlighting the risk of disease in those areas.
“The goal is to guide care with one test that shows not only overall biological age, but which systems are driving it,” says Raghav Sehgal at Yale University. “That way, people can get specific lifestyle or treatment recommendations based on their unique profile.”
Once their model was trained, the researchers tested it on blood from an additional 8125 people, whose data was used in four other studies. They found, for example, that their model’s heart score could predict heart disease, the brain score tracked with cognitive decline and the musculoskeletal score reflected whether people had conditions like arthritis.
When tested against existing epigenetic clocks, the organ/system-specific scores were at least as accurate, and mostly better, according to the researchers. “It’s somewhat remarkable that we could validly estimate ageing across so many systems by just measuring one thing in a blood test,” says Levine.
Full article: One blood sample could reveal the age of 11 of your organs and systems