What are biological aging clocks?
Think of your body like a rechargeable battery. A brand-new battery can hold a full charge and reliably power your devices. But over time, as it cycles on and off, its capacity gradually declines. Biological age works in a similar way: it’s a measure of your body’s functional capacity rather than simply how many years you’ve been alive.
The tools scientists use to estimate this capacity are called aging clocks (sometimes called omic clocks or biological age tests). These are methods designed to measure how “old” your body really is on the inside.
The field is still very young. The first formal descriptions of aging clocks only appeared in 2013. Since then, researchers have developed dozens of different clocks, each tracking biological age in its own way. Some rely on protein patterns in the blood, others focus on how well the immune system functions, and many examine epigenetic modifications — subtle chemical changes that alter how genes are switched on and off without rewriting the underlying DNA code.
How do aging clocks work?
Most modern aging clocks are powered by machine learning. In essence, these are statistical models that can detect patterns across massive datasets and then make predictions based on those patterns. The mathematical foundation is usually a technique called regression, which estimates the likelihood of certain outcomes by assigning “weights” to different variables.
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