Biological age is often associated with specialized molecular tests. But researchers can also estimate biological aging using measurements already collected in routine medical care.
These can include blood chemistry, complete blood counts, blood pressure and measures of organ function.
But the laboratory results themselves are not a biological age.
To turn clinical measurements into a biological-aging measure, researchers first select a group of biomarkers and then combine them using a defined statistical algorithm.
For example, the BioAge research toolkit developed by Kwon and Belsky allows clinical biomarker data to be analyzed using established methods including KDM Biological Age, PhenoAge and Homeostatic Dysregulation.
These methods do not interpret the same measurements in exactly the same way.
KDM Biological Age combines multiple biomarkers to estimate how an individual's biological profile relates to age-related changes in a reference population.
PhenoAge uses a different approach that incorporates information related to mortality risk.
Homeostatic Dysregulation measures how far a person's overall physiological profile has moved away from a healthy reference state.
This means that routine clinical tests can provide the biological information needed to quantify aging, but the resulting biological-age measure also depends on the method used to interpret those measurements.
The study also showed that biomarker selection matters. Different combinations of available clinical biomarkers can affect how well biological-aging algorithms perform.
Routine blood and clinical tests therefore offer a potentially practical way to study biological aging without requiring a separate molecular aging test. But there is no single laboratory panel that automatically produces a definitive biological age.
