Although biological age is not a new term, it is currently one of the hottest topics in health care as the boomer generation enters their golden years.

Biological age helps explain why some individuals of the same age have profound differences in capabilities – why some can run a marathon and scale mountains, while others are riddled with health conditions or require around-the-clock care. Biological age is not chronological age, which is your age based on when you were born. Rather, biological age is how old your body behaves physically and mentally – your physiological age.

Environmental exposures, dietary habits, level of exercise, physical and mental health status, and even the amount of your social stimulation can affect the “age” of your cells. Your biological age is a reflection of how much “damage” your body accumulates over time. Although your body might not feel old in your 30s or 40s, simple everyday behaviors can adversely affect you internally in ways that can alter your healthspan as you age.

Introducing Thorne's Biological Age Health Panel

Thorne released its first in-lab biological age blood panel in March 2021, and it has since been very popular with Thorne customers who want to know how their lifestyle – diet, exercise regimen (or lack thereof), habits, and environment – affects their aging process. 

The Biological Age Health Panel uses 42 blood biomarkers and a research-validated algorithm that uses hundreds of thousands of biomarkers to provide invaluable scores that estimate a person's biological, liver, kidney, lipid, metabolic, and blood ages.

As you age, your risk for almost every chronic disease increases.1 Research indicates that biological age is actually a better predictor of disease risk than chronological age. Biological age is also highly associated with all-cause mortality and risk for numerous adverse health conditions like diabetes, cancer, dementia, and organ-specific damage.2

Therefore, reversing or slowing your biological age clock can have a clinically beneficial impact on your health and longevity. Thorne’s Biological Age Health Panel is designed to help you do that. 

How Does the Biological Age Health Panel Work?

After you purchase a Biological Age Health Panel and complete your health profile, a lab requisition form automatically populates that enables you to make an appointment or walk into a local Quest Lab for a fasted blood draw. It requires a venipuncture in your arm that takes four small vials of blood. 

Your values are analyzed in a database that contains hundreds of thousands of other people's biomarkers that estimates what your body looks like internally, compared to others of your same age and gender. This large database comparison is what is unique to Thorne – it analyzes characteristics of adults – of all ages and all walks of life – from athletes to those with chronic diseases – and calculates your internal age compared to your peers.

Your Biological Age report provides your overall age and rate of aging for your entire body and specific organs – so you will know, for example, if your liver is aging faster than your kidneys, or how old your immune system is compared to others. Your personalized recommendations are focused on the oldest age scores and will provide resources on how to slow or perhaps reverse your biological age clock. 

By changing one biomarker, you can ultimately affect the rate at which your entire body is aging.

What Makes Thorne's Biological Age Health Panel Unique?

The comparison database. Biological Age boasts an enormous database of diverse and longitudinal biomarkers that train the research-backed algorithm (Klemera-Doubal)3 to compute biological age scores. Because it has been tested to show unbiased accuracy across users and generations, the biological age predictions are not skewed – as some tests are – if you are analyzing chronologically younger or older adults.4

Housed on the Onegevity Health platform, this proprietary algorithm uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to continuously refine its computation, scores, and recommendations. Therefore, you can take the Biological Age Health Panel with the confidence that your age scores are valid, reliable, and sensitive to the slightest changes you might not even notice as you age – like a cholesterol level that creeps up or an albumin level that slowly trends down.

And because the Biological Age Health Panel uses blood biomarkers, results come back quickly – and it’s affordable and convenient for anyone looking to understand their state of health and wellness.

Biological Age (formerly Agebio by Onegevity) Backstory

The Biological Age Health Panel was co-created by the science team at Onegevity Health (now merged with Thorne Research to create Thorne HealthTech) and world-renowned aging researcher Leroy Hood, MD, PhD. Dr. Hood is the inventor of groundbreaking scientific instruments, including DNA and protein sequencers, that significantly advanced treatment opportunities for HIV treatments and the Human Genome Project.

He is one of 15 scientists to be elected to all three national academies – the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the National Academy of Medicine. He has received 17 honorary degrees and the distinguished National Medal of Science from President Obama in 2013.

References

  1. Niccoli T, Partridge L. Aging as a risk factor for disease. Curr Biol 2012;22(17):R741-R752.
  2. Levine M. Modeling the rate of senescence: can estimated biological age predict mortality more accurately than chronological age? J Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci 2013;68(6):667-674. 
  3. Klemera P, Doubal S. A new approach to the concept and computation of biological age. Mech Ageing Dev 2006;127(3):240-248.
  4. Jia L, Zhang W, Chen X. Common methods of biological age estimation. Clin Interv Aging 2017;12:759-772.