Everone clamors for a reliable way to assess biological age. Many have been proposed, with many disappointing results. Epigenetic clocks have had a ton of hype, but ultimately were revealed to be utterly useless and random.
Get ready for a new kid on the block: The Health Octo Tool. Will this finally give us something as universally agreed upon as the calendar for the calendar age? Let’s see.
Health octo tool matches personalized health with rate of aging
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-58819-x
“Medical practice mainly addresses single diseases, neglecting multimorbidity as a heterogeneous health decline across organ systems. Aging is a multidimensional process and cannot be captured by a single metric. Therefore, we assessed global health in longitudinal studies, BLSA (n = 907), InCHIANTI (n = 986), and NHANES (n = 40,790), by examining disease severities in 13 bodily systems, generating the Body Organ Disease Number (BODN), reflecting progressive system morbidities. We used Bayesian ordinal models, regressing BODN over organ specific and all organs disease severities to obtain Body System-Specific Clocks and the Body Clock, respectively. The Body Clock is BODN weighted by the posterior coefficient of diseases for each individual. It supersedes the frailty index, predicting disability, geriatric syndrome, SPPB, and mortality with ≥90% accuracy. The Health Octo Tool, derived from Bodily System-Specific Clocks, the Body Clock and Clocks that incorporate walking speed and disability and their aging rates, captures multidimensional aging heterogeneity across organs and individuals.“