People are flocking to so-called longevity clinics and buying tests online to find out their “biological age”—a metric that some scientists say could reveal how healthy a person really is ….
The U.S. government recently launched an initiative to identify more accurate and reliable ways to measure biological age. Companies and researchers globally are racing to do the same. The number and diversity of these tools, often referred to as “biological-age clocks,” is dizzying. Some are blood or saliva tests and are based on chemical modifications to DNA …. Some purport to measure biological age based on images of a person’s retina or face ….
The problem is, nobody quite knows how these clocks actually work or if they work at all.
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At this point, clocks that people use to appraise their own health are merely a form of “consumer longevitainment,” [says Martin Borch Jensen, founder of Norn Group, a think tank for longevity research]. “What is needed are clocks that are interpretable, which means that there is a clear causal link between the test and biological age.”
