Concept

Biological age

Biological age is an estimate of how old your body seems based on biomarkers, as opposed to chronological age. Several “clocks” aim to measure it, but methods and validation vary.

Also known as: biological age, physiological age, biological aging, ageotypes

What it is

Biological age is an attempt to express how old you are physiologically — using biomarkers like an epigenetic clock, blood panels or functional tests — rather than the years since birth (chronological age).

Why it matters for longevity

If biological age can be measured reliably, it could act as a near-term readout for whether an intervention is helping, instead of waiting decades for mortality data. It ties many of the hallmarks of aging into a single number.

What the evidence shows

Different clocks and panels disagree, can be noisy at the individual level, and few are validated to *change* outcomes when you act on them. They are valuable research tools and improving fast, but a single “biological age” result should be read as an estimate, not a verdict.

How we use it

We treat biological-age measures as supportive signals and weight hard outcomes and well-validated risk markers more heavily.

Sources & references

  1. Jylhävä J, Pedersen NL, Hägg S. Biological age predictors. EBioMedicine. 2017. doi:10.1016/j.ebiom.2017.03.046
  2. Horvath S. DNA methylation age of human tissues and cell types. Genome Biology. 2013. doi:10.1186/gb-2013-14-10-r115

Related terms

Educational information, not medical advice. Evidence ratings follow our methodology.