How old are you, really? New tool measures aging from the inside out

A new health-assessment method, called the Health Octo Tool, uses eight measures drawn from physical exams and routine lab tests to calculate a person’s biological age.

The tool may predict an individual’s risk of disability and death more accurately than existing health predictors.

New tool to measure aging

The research team, led by Shabnam Salimi from the University of Washington School of Medicine, believes the tool could uncover new factors that shape the aging process and help design interventions to extend lifespan. Salimi is a physician-scientist and acting instructor in the Department of Anesthesiology & Pain Medicine.

According to Salimi, existing health-assessment methods focus on the effects of individual diseases. However, they fail to take into consideration the interactions among diseases and how minor disorders affect overall health.

“An aging-based framework offers a new path to discover biomarkers and therapeutics that target organ-specific or whole-body aging, rather than individual diseases,” she explained.

The tool is built around the concept of “health entropy,” which refers to the accumulation of molecular and cellular damage over time and its impact on how well the body’s organs and systems function.

In short, health entropy can be viewed as an indicator of a person’s general physical condition and can be translated into a measure of how quickly or slowly someone is aging.

Data from major aging studies

To develop and test the Health Octo Tool, the researchers analyzed data from the Baltimore Longitudinal Study on Aging, one of the world’s longest-running aging studies. They used participants’ medical histories, physical exam results, and lab test outcomes.

To confirm their findings, they then tested the method on two additional large datasets covering over 45,000 adults. The team first created what they called a Body Organ Disease Number.

This score reflects how many organ systems – such as the cardiovascular, respiratory, and nervous systems – are affected by disease and whether a person has had cancer or a stroke. The score ranges from 1 to 14, depending on the extent of organ system involvement.

A detailed picture of biological age

“Our findings demonstrated that organ systems age at different rates, prompting us to develop a Bodily System-Specific Age metric to reflect the aging rate of each organ system and the Bodily-Specific Clock to represent each organ system’s intrinsic biological age,” Salimi said.

“Extending this concept to the whole body, we define the Body Clock as a composite measure of overall intrinsic age and Body Age as the corresponding rate of aging.”

Since not all people of the same biological age experience the same level of physical decline, the team also created additional metrics. These include the Speed-Body Clock and Speed-Body Age, which describe how biological age affects walking speed – often used as a simple test of older adults’ functional capacity.

Measuring disability risks

The team also introduced the Disability-Body Clock and Disability-Body Age, designed to estimate how aging influences the risk of developing cognitive or physical disabilities.

“Collectively, these eight metrics – Body Clock, Body Age, system-specific clocks and rates, Speed- and Disability-based clocks – offer a way to view an individual’s aging process with information gathered from their medical history, physical exam, and test results alone,” Salimi said.

One key takeaway from the study is that even relatively minor health conditions, if left untreated early in life, can significantly influence biological aging later on.

For example, untreated high blood pressure during youth may greatly accelerate aging down the line. This suggests that early treatment of such conditions could have a meaningful impact on lifelong health.

Looking ahead: A digital aging tracker

The research team is now working on a digital app that will allow individuals and their healthcare providers to calculate their body’s and organs’ biological ages. The tool will let people track how quickly they are aging and measure the effects of lifestyle changes or treatments.

“Whether someone is adopting a new diet, exercise routine or taking longevity-targeting drugs, they will be able to visualize how their body – and each organ system – is responding,” Salimi explained.

By combining clinical data with detailed biological models, the Health Octo Tool offers a promising new way to track aging, tailor treatments, and potentially improve long-term health outcomes.

The study is published in the journal Nature Communications.

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