The evidence is convergent. Multiple independent sources reach the same conclusion, the underlying mechanism is well-characterized, and even the field's most cautious voices treat it as worth doing.
The authors emphasize that first-generation clocks (pure age predictors) often lacked strong associations with health & lifestyle factors. Their approach is more aligned with “next-generation” clocks that embed biology & health data
Every Sunday: the week’s new conflicts and verdict changes — and nothing else.
Native comments, Twitter mentions, and Reddit threads about this claim — surfaced together so the conversation isn't fragmented across platforms.
Bookmarking — the dossier-vs-overview split is the right call. Most of the time I want overview; sometimes I want receipts.
Would love a "what would change this verdict" RSS feed. Sign me up if it exists.
Some interventions showing epigenetic age reversal have used 1st-generation epigenetic clocks, which are not as good for predicting biological age as 2nd-generation clocks.
Listen to @drmorganlevine discuss how second-generation clocks go a step beyond tracking chronological age by statistically regressing more conventional health-related biomarkers and how they can more accurately detect biological age and age acceleration.
So, it's can we try and approximate something that's not really measurable? And then the way we evaluate if we did that well is does it predict or track with things we would expect? So again, with epigenetic tests, it should predict things like mortality risk after you adjust out the chronological age.
So, what the second-generation clocks did, the one that we published in 2018 was the first example, is we said, "Oh, can we come up with a better thing to try and kind of tune these measures to?" So, in that case, we used kind of normal lab tests that we combined into a measure that was predictive of mortality and then we trained a predictor of those lab tests. And a similar thing was done with the GrimAge clock where they took these different proteins and they trained predictors of that and then trained the predictor of mortality.
So yes, there's a lot of tests on the market but I think it's really important to make sure you're using ones trained more like the second-generation clock, so, things like GrimAge or PhenoAge, but again, using these methods that make them more kind of reliable and take out the noise.
And people who are using these first-generation clocks, the ones trained to predict chronological age, are not as good at that.
So, we think that something that captures mortality or health span or kind of physiological decline is going to be a better thing to tune these clocks to than just chronological age.
Biological age, typically, we measure this through epigenetic aging. And these epigenetic aging clocks were developed by Dr. Steve Horvath when he was at UCLA. And there's a a variety of different clocks that are used. There's the DNA grimage, the DNA pheno age. Um, and those are two of the major ones.