This new health tool can not just find out your biological age but can also predict death

A new health assessment tool by researchers from the University of Washington School of Medicine can find out your biological age and even predict the person’s risk of disability and death.

This new method, the researchers claim is better than current health predictors. The team has described their method in the Nature Communications paper.

The new method is based on the concept of ageing called 'health entropy' which serves as a measure of an individual’s overall physical well-being and be translated to describe a person’s pace of ageing. 

The first author of the report, Dr Shabnam Salimi, says the Health Octo Tool, might make it possible to identify new factors that affect ageing and to design interventions that prolong life. 

Compared with the existing methods, Salimi says current health assessment methods focus on the effects of individual diseases but fail to consider the interactions among diseases and the impact of minor disorders on overall health.

The researchers analysed data from the Baltimore Longitudinal Study on Aging which is one of the longest-running studies of adults as they grow older. 

The data included participants’ medical history and the results of their physical exams and medical tests. To validate their new approach, researchers then analysed the results of two other large studies that traced the health of more than 45,000 adults.

“Our findings demonstrated that organ systems age at different rates, prompting us to develop a Bodily System-Specific Age metric to reflect the ageing rate of each organ system and the Bodily-Specific Clock to represent each organ system’s intrinsic biological age,” Salimi said.

Collectively, the team developed eight metrics — Body Clock, Body Age, system-specific clocks and rates, Speed- and Disability-based clocks — which would help to view an individual's ageing process with information gathered from their medical history, physical exam and test results alone. 

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