People’s bodies age at different rates. Age-related biological changes that increase the risk of disease and disability progress rapidly in some people. In others, these processes occur at a slower pace, allowing those individuals to live longer, healthier lives. This observation has led scientists to try to develop therapies that slow aging. The hope is that such treatments could prevent or delay diseases like heart disease or dementia, for which older age is the leading risk factor.

Studies in animals have identified treatments that extend the creatures’ lives and slow age-related disease. But testing these treatments in humans is challenging. Our lives are much longer than the worms, flies or mice used in the experiments. Scientists would have to follow human study participants for decades to detect delays in disease onset or an extension of their lives. An alternative approach is to try to develop a test that measures the pace of aging, or essentially “a speedometer for aging”. This would allow scientists to more quickly determine if treatments slow the aging process.

Now, Belsky et al. show a blood test designed to measure the pace of aging predicts which people are at increased risk of poor health, chronic disease and an earlier death. First, data about chemical changes to an individual’s DNA, called DNA methylation, were analyzed from white blood cell samples collected from 954 people in a long-term health study known as “The Dunedin Study”. Using the data, Belsky et al. then developed an algorithm – named “DunedinPoAm” – that identified people with an accelerated or slowed pace of aging based on a single blood test. Next, they used the algorithm on samples from participants in three other long-term studies. This verified that those people the algorithm identified as aging faster had a greater risk of poor health, developing chronic diseases or dying earlier. Similarly, those identified as aging more slowly performed better on tests of balance, strength, walking speed and mental ability, and they also looked younger to trained raters. Additionally, Belsky et al. used the test on participants in a randomized trial testing whether restricting calories had potential to extend healthy lifespan. The results suggested that the calorie restriction could counter the effects of an accelerated pace of aging.

The test developed by Belsky et al. may provide an alternate way of measuring whether age-slowing treatments work. This would allow faster testing of treatments that can extend the healthy lifespan of humans. The test may also help identify individuals with accelerated aging. This might help public health officials test whether policies or programs can help people lead longer, healthier lives.

Aging of the global population is producing forecasts of rising burden of disease and disability (Harper, 2014). Because this burden arises from multiple age-related diseases, treatments for single diseases will not address the burden challenge (Goldman et al., 2013). Geroscience research suggests an appealing alternative: treatments to slow aging itself could prevent or delay the multiple diseases that increase with advancing age, perhaps with a single therapeutic approach (Gladyshev, 2016; Kaeberlein, 2013). Aging can be understood as a gradual and progressive deterioration in biological system integrity (Kirkwood, 2005). This deterioration is thought to arise from an accumulation of cellular-level changes. These changes, in turn, increase vulnerability to diseases affecting many different organ systems (Kennedy et al., 2014; López-Otín et al., 2013). Animal studies suggest treatments that slow the accumulation of cellular-level changes can extend healthy lifespan (Campisi et al., 2019; Kaeberlein et al., 2015). However, human trials of these treatments are challenging because humans live much longer than model animals, making it time-consuming and costly to follow up human trial participants to test treatment effects on healthy lifespan. This challenge will be exacerbated in trials that will give treatments to young or middle-aged adults, with the aim to prevent the decline in system integrity that antedates disease onset by years. Involving young and midlife adults in healthspan-extension trials has been approved for development by the National Advisory Council on Aging (2019 CTAP report to NACA). In midlife trials of treatments to slow aging, called geroprotectors (Moskalev et al., 2016), traditional endpoints such as disease diagnosis or death are too far in the future to serve as outcomes. Translation of geroprotector treatments to humans could be aided by measures that quantify the pace of deterioration in biological system integrity in human aging. Such measures could be used as surrogate endpoints for healthy lifespan extension (Justice et al., 2016; Justice et al., 2018; Moskalev et al., 2016), even with young-to-midlife adult trial participants. A useful measure should be non-invasive, inexpensive, reliable, and highly sensitive to biological change.

Recent efforts to develop such measures have focused on blood DNA methylation as a biological substrate highly sensitive to changes in chronological age (Fahy et al., 2019; Horvath and Raj, 2018). Methylation-clock algorithms have been developed to identify methylation patterns that characterize individuals of different chronological ages. However, a limitation is that individuals born in different years have grown up under different historical conditions (Schaie, 1967). For example, people born 70 years ago experienced more exposure to childhood diseases, tobacco smoke, airborne lead, and less exposure to antibiotics and other medications, and lower quality nutrition, all of which leave signatures on DNA methylation (Bell et al., 2019). As a result, the clocks confound methylation patterns arising from early-life exposures to methylation-altering factors with methylation patterns related to biological aging during adulthood. An alternative approach is to study individuals who were all born the same year, and find methylation patterns that differentiate those who have been aging biologically faster or slower than their same-age peers. The current article reports four steps in our work toward developing a blood DNA methylation measure to represent individual variation in the pace of biological aging.

In Step 1, which we previously reported (Belsky et al., 2015), we collected a panel of 18 blood-chemistry and organ-system-function biomarkers at three successive waves of the Dunedin Study, which follows a 1972–73 population-representative one-year birth cohort (N = 1037). We used repeated-measures data collected when Study members were aged 26, 32, and 38 years old to quantify rates of biological change. We modelled the rate of change in each biomarker and calculated how each Study member’s personal rate-of-change on that biomarker differed from the cohort norm. We then combined the 18 personal rates of change across the panel of biomarkers to compute a composite for each Study member that we called the Pace of Aging. Pace of Aging represents a personal rate of multi-organ-system decline over a dozen years. Pace of Aging was normally distributed, and showed marked variation among Study members who were all the same chronological age, confirming that individual differences in biological aging do emerge already by age 38, years before chronic disease onset.

In Step 2, which we previously reported, we validated the Pace of Aging against known criteria. As compared to other Study members who were the same chronological age but had slower Pace of Aging, Study members with faster Pace of Aging performed more poorly on tests of physical function; showed signs of cognitive decline on a panel of dementia-relevant neuropsychological tests from an early-life baseline; were rated as looking older based on facial photographs; and reported themselves to be in worse health (Belsky et al., 2015). Subsequently, we reported that faster Pace of Aging is associated with early-life factors important for aging: familial longevity, low childhood social class, and adverse childhood experiences (Belsky et al., 2017), and that faster Pace of Aging is associated with older scores on Brain Age, a machine-learning-derived measure of structural MRI differences characteristic of different age groups (Elliott et al., 2019). Notably, Pace of Aging was not well-correlated with published epigenetic age clocks, which were designed to measure how old a person is rather than how fast they are aging biologically (Belsky et al., 2018b).

In Step 3, which we report here, we distill the Pace of Aging into a measurement that can be obtained from a single blood sample. Here we focused on blood DNA methylation as an accessible molecular measurement that is sensitive to changes in physiology occurring in multiple organ systems (Birney et al., 2016; Bolund et al., 2017; Chambers et al., 2015; Chu et al., 2017; Hedman et al., 2017; Ma et al., 2019; Mill and Heijmans, 2013; Morris et al., 2017; Wahl et al., 2017). We used data about the Pace of Aging from age 26 to 38 years in the Dunedin Study along with whole-genome methylation data at age 38 years. Elastic-net regression was applied to derive an algorithm that captured DNA methylation patterns linked with variation among individuals in their Pace of Aging. The algorithm is hereafter termed ‘DunedinPoAm’.

DunedinPoAm is qualitatively different from previously published DNA methylation measures of aging that were developed by comparing older individuals to younger ones. Those measures, often referred to as ‘clocks,’ are state measures. They estimate how much aging has occurred in an individual up to the point of measurement. DunedinPoAm is a rate measure. It is based on comparison of longitudinal change over time in 18 biomarkers of organ-system integrity among individuals who are all the same chronological age. DunedinPoAm estimates how fast aging is occurring during the years leading up to the time of measurement. Rather than a clock that records how much time has passed, DunedinPoAm is designed to function as a speedometer, recording how fast the subject is aging.

In Step 4, which we report here, we validated the DunedinPoAm in five ways. First, using the Dunedin Study, we tested if Study member’s DunedinPoAm measured when they were aged 38 years could predict deficits in physical and cognitive functioning seven years later, when the cohort was aged 45 years. Second, we applied the DunedinPoAm algorithm to DNA methylation data from a second, cross-sectional, study of adults to evaluate patterning of DunedinPoAm by chronological age and sex and to test correlations of DunedinPoAm with self-reported health and proposed measures of biological age, including three epigenetic clocks. Third, we applied the DunedinPoAm algorithm to DNA methylation data from a third, longitudinal study of older men to test associations with chronic-disease morbidity and mortality. Fourth, we applied the DunedinPoAm algorithm to DNA methylation data from a fourth, longitudinal, study of young people to test if DunedinPoAm was accelerated by exposure to poverty and victimization, factors which are known to shorten healthy lifespan. Finally, to ascertain the potential usefulness of DunedinPoAm as a measure for trials of geroprotector treatments, we applied the algorithm to DNA methylation data from a randomized trial of caloric restriction, CALERIE (Ravussin et al., 2015). Earlier we reported from this trial that the intervention (two years of prescribed 25% caloric restriction) slowed the rate of biological aging as measured by a blood-chemistry biological-age composite measure (Belsky et al., 2018a). Here, using newly generated methylation data from blood drawn at the CALERIE baseline assessment, we tested if (a) DunedinPoAm from blood drawn before caloric restriction could predict the future rate of biological aging of participants during the two-year trial, and (b) if this prediction was disrupted in participants who underwent caloric restriction, but not among control participants.

We report promising results from this four-step research program, while appreciating that additional measurement development will be needed to support applied use of DunedinPoAm. A graphical illustration of our study design is presented in Figure 1.

Figure 1 with 3 supplements see all

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Breakthrough discoveries in the new field of geroscience suggest opportunities to extend healthy lifespan through interventions that slow biological processes of aging (Campisi et al., 2019). To advance translation of these interventions, measures are needed that can detect changes in a person’s rate of biological aging (Moffitt et al., 2017). We previously showed that the rate of biological aging can be measured by tracking change over time in multiple indicators of organ-system integrity (Belsky et al., 2015). Here, we report data illustrating the potential to streamline measurement of Pace of Aging to an exportable, inexpensive and non-invasive blood test, and thereby ease implementation of Pace of Aging measurement in studies of interventions to slow processes of biological aging.

We conducted machine-learning analysis of the original Pace of Aging measure using elastic-net regression and whole-genome blood DNA methylation data. We trained the algorithm to predict how fast a person was aging. We called the resulting algorithm ‘DunedinPoAm’ for ‘ (P)ace (o)f (A)ging (m)ethylation’. There were four overall findings:

First, while DunedinPoAm was not a perfect proxy of Pace of Aging, it nevertheless captured critical information about Dunedin Study members’ healthspan-related characteristics. Across the domains of physical function, cognitive function, and subjective signs of aging, Study members with faster DunedinPoAm at age 38 were worse off seven years later at age 45 and, in repeated-measures analysis of change, they showed signs of more rapid decline. Effect-sizes were equal to or greater than those for the 18-biomarker 3-time point measure of Pace of Aging. This result suggests that the DNA-methylation elastic-net regression used to develop DunedinPoAm may have distilled the aging signal from the original Pace of Aging measure and excluded some noise. In sum, DunedinPoAm showed promise as an easy-to-implement alternative to Pace of Aging. Emerging technologies for deep-learning analysis (Zhavoronkov et al., 2019) may improve methylation measurement of Pace of Aging. Alternatively, integration of methylation data with additional molecular datasets (Hasin et al., 2017; Zierer et al., 2015) may be needed to achieve precise measurement of Pace of Aging from a single time-point blood sample.

Second, DunedinPoAm analysis of the Understanding Society and NAS samples provided proof-of-concept for using DunedinPoAm to quantify biological aging. Age differences in DunedinPoAm parallel population demographic patterns of mortality risk. In the Understanding Society sample, older adults had faster DunedinPoAm as compared to younger ones. In the NAS sample, participants’ DunedinPoAm values increased as they aged. These observations are consistent with the well-documented acceleration of mortality risk with advancing chronological age (Robine, 2011). However, it sets DunedinPoAm apart from other indices of biological aging, which are not known to register this acceleration (Finch and Crimmins, 2016; Li et al., 2020). DunedinPoAm may therefore provide a novel tool for testing how the rate of aging changes across the life course and whether, as demographic data documenting so-called ‘mortality plateaus’ suggest, processes of aging slow down at the oldest chronological ages (Barbi et al., 2018).

DunedinPoAm is related to but distinct from alternative approaches to quantification of biological aging. DunedinPoAm was moderately correlated with aging rates measured by the epigenetic clocks proposed by Hannum et al. (2013); Levine et al. (2018) as well as KDM Biological Age derived from clinical biomarker data (Klemera and Doubal, 2006; Levine, 2013), and with self-rated health. Consistent with findings for the measured Pace of Aging (Belsky et al., 2018b), DunedinPoAm was only weakly correlated with the multi-tissue clock proposed by Horvath. DunedinPoAm was more strongly correlated with a clinical-biomarker measure of biological age, with self-rated health, with functional test-performance and decline, and with morbidity and mortality as compared to the epigenetic clocks.

Third, DunedinPoAm is already variable by young adulthood and is accelerated in young people at risk for eventual shortened healthspan. E-Risk young adults who grew up in socioeconomically disadvantaged families or who were exposed to victimization early in life already showed accelerated DunedinPoAm by age 18, consistent with epidemiological observations of shorter healthy lifespan for individuals with these exposures (Adler and Rehkopf, 2008; Danese and McEwen, 2012). We previously found that Dunedin Study members with histories of early-life adversity showed accelerated Pace of Aging in their 30 s (Belsky et al., 2017). DunedinPoAm analysis of the E-Risk cohort suggests effects may be already manifest at least a decade earlier. DunedinPoAm may therefore provide a useful index that can be applied to evaluate prevention programs to buffer at-risk youth against health damaging effects of challenging circumstances.

Fourth, DunedinPoAm analysis of the CALERIE trial provided proof-of-concept for using DunedinPoAm to quantify biological aging in geroprotector intervention studies. DunedinPoAm measures the rate of aging over the recent past. Control-arm participants’ baseline DunedinPoAm correlated positively with their clinical-biomarker pace of aging over the two years of the trial, consistent with the hypothesis that their rate of aging was not altered. In contrast, there was no relationship between DunedinPoAm and clinical-biomarker pace of aging for caloric-restriction-arm participants, consistent with the hypothesis that caloric restriction altered participants’ rate of aging. Ultimately, data on DunedinPoAm for all CALERIE participants (and participants in other geroprotector trails) at trial baseline and follow-up will be needed to establish utility of DunedinPoAm as a surrogate endpoint. In the mean-time, these data establish potential to use DunedinPoAm as a pre-treatment covariate in geroprotector trials to boost statistical power (Kahan et al., 2014) or to screen participants for enrollment, for example to identify those who are aging more rapidly and may therefore show larger effects of treatment.

We acknowledge limitations. Foremost, DunedinPoAm is a first step toward a single-assay cross-sectional measurement of Pace of Aging. The relatively modest size of the Dunedin cohort and the lack of other cohorts that have the requisite three or more waves of repeated biomarkers to measure the Pace of Aging limited sample size for our machine-learning analysis to develop methylation algorithms. As Pace of Aging is measured in additional cohorts, more refined analysis to develop DunedinPoAm-type algorithms will become possible. A related issue is scaling of DunedinPoAm. The original Pace of Aging measure from which DunedinPoAm was developed is denominated in ‘years’ of physiological decline occurring per 12 months of calendar time. Units of DunedinPoAm can, in principle, be interpreted in the same way. But replication in additional cohorts is needed. In addition, our work thus far has not addressed population diversity in biological aging. The Dunedin cohort in which DunedinPoAm was developed and the Understanding Society, NAS, and E-Risk cohorts and CALERIE trial sample in which it was tested were mostly of white European descent. Follow-up of DunedinPoAm in more diverse samples is needed to establish cross-population validity. Finally, because methylation data are not yet available from CALERIE follow-up assessments, we could not test if intervention modified DunedinPoAm at outcome. Ultimately, to establish DunedinPoAm as a surrogate endpoint for healthspan, it will be necessary to establish not only robust association with healthy lifespan phenotypes and modifiability by intervention, but also the extent to which changes in DunedinPoAm induced by intervention correspond to changes in healthy-lifespan phenotypes (Prentice, 1989).

Within the bounds of these limitations, our analysis establishes proof-of-concept for DunedinPoAm as a single-time-point measure that quantifies Pace of Aging from a blood test. It can be implemented in Illumina 450 k and EPIC array data, making it immediately available for testing in a wide range of existing datasets as a complement to existing methylation measures of aging. Critically, DunedinPoAm offers a unique measurement for intervention trials and natural experiment studies investigating how the rate of aging may be changed by behavioral or drug therapy, or by environmental modification. DunedinPoAm may be especially valuable to studies that collect data outside of clinical settings and lack blood chemistry, hematology, and other data needed to measure aging-related changes to physiology.

Datasets are available from the data owners. Data from the Dunedin and E-Risk Study can be accessed through agreement with the Study investigators. Instructions are available at https://sites.google.com/site/moffittcaspiprojects/. The data access application form can be downloaded here: https://sites.google.com/site/moffittcaspiprojects/forms-for-new-projects/concept-paper-template. Data from the Understanding Society Study is available through METADAC at https://www.metadac.ac.uk/ukhls/. All details are on the Metadac website (https://www.metadac.ac.uk/data-access-through-metadac/). The data access application form can be found here https://www.metadac.ac.uk/files/2019/02/v2.41-UKHLS-METADAC-application-form-2019-2hak8bv.docx. Data from the Normative Aging Study were obtained from the Study investigators. Data are accessible through dbGaP, accession phs000853.v1.p1. CALERIE Data are available for download from the CALERIE Biorepository at https://calerie.duke.edu/. Details are on the website here: https://calerie.duke.edu/samples-data-access-and-analysis.

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Author details

1. Daniel W Belsky

   1. Department of Epidemiology, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, New York, United States
   2. Butler Columbia Aging Center, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, New York, United States

   Contribution

   Conceptualization, Resources, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Writing - original draft, Writing - review and editing

   For correspondence

   db3275@cumc.columbia.edu

   Competing interests

   No competing interests declared

   "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-5463-2212

2. Avshalom Caspi

   1. Social, Genetic, and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, London, United Kingdom
   2. Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, United States
   3. Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, United States
   4. Center for Genomic and Computational Biology, Duke University, Durham, United States

   Contribution

   Conceptualization, Resources, Funding acquisition, Writing - original draft, Writing - review and editing

   Competing interests

   No competing interests declared

3. Louise Arseneault

   Social, Genetic, and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, London, United Kingdom

   Contribution

   Resources, Funding acquisition, Writing - review and editing

   Competing interests

   No competing interests declared

4. Andrea Baccarelli

   Laboratory of Precision Environmental Health, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York, United States

   Contribution

   Resources, Writing - review and editing

   Competing interests

   No competing interests declared

5. David L Corcoran

   Center for Genomic and Computational Biology, Duke University, Durham, United States

   Contribution

   Data curation, Formal analysis, Writing - review and editing

   Competing interests

   No competing interests declared

6. Xu Gao

   Laboratory of Precision Environmental Health, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York, United States

   Contribution

   Formal analysis, Writing - review and editing

   Competing interests

   No competing interests declared

7. Eiliss Hannon

   University of Exeter Medical School, College of Medicine and Health, Exeter, United Kingdom

   Contribution

   Data curation, Writing - review and editing

   Competing interests

   No competing interests declared

8. Hona Lee Harrington

   Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, United States

   Contribution

   Data curation, Writing - review and editing

   Competing interests

   No competing interests declared

9. Line JH Rasmussen

   1. Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, United States
   2. Clinical Research Centre, Copenhagen University Hospital Amager and Hvidovre, Hvidovre, Denmark

   Contribution

   Writing - review and editing

   Competing interests

   No competing interests declared

   "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-6613-2469

10. Renate Houts

    Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, United States

    Contribution

    Writing - review and editing

    Competing interests

    No competing interests declared

11. Kim Huffman

    1. Duke Molecular Physiology Institute, Duke University, Durham, United States
    2. Duke University Center for the Study of Aging, Duke University, Durham, United States

    Contribution

    Writing - review and editing

    Competing interests

    No competing interests declared

12. William E Kraus

    1. Duke Molecular Physiology Institute, Duke University, Durham, United States
    2. Duke University Center for the Study of Aging, Duke University, Durham, United States

    Contribution

    Writing - review and editing

    Competing interests

    No competing interests declared

13. Dayoon Kwon

    Butler Columbia Aging Center, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, New York, United States

    Contribution

    Formal analysis

    Competing interests

    No competing interests declared

14. Jonathan Mill

    University of Exeter Medical School, College of Medicine and Health, Exeter, United Kingdom

    Contribution

    Resources, Funding acquisition, Writing - review and editing

    Competing interests

    No competing interests declared

15. Carl F Pieper

    1. Duke University Center for the Study of Aging, Duke University, Durham, United States
    2. Department of Biostatistics, Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, United States

    Contribution

    Writing - review and editing

    Competing interests

    No competing interests declared

16. Joseph A Prinz

    Center for Genomic and Computational Biology, Duke University, Durham, United States

    Contribution

    Data curation, Formal analysis, Writing - review and editing

    Competing interests

    No competing interests declared

17. Richie Poulton

    Department of Psychology and Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Research Unit, University of Otago, Otago, New Zealand

    Contribution

    Resources, Funding acquisition, Writing - review and editing

    Competing interests

    No competing interests declared

18. Joel Schwartz

    Department of Environmental Health Sciences, Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, Boston, United States

    Contribution

    Resources

    Competing interests

    No competing interests declared

19. Karen Sugden

    Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, United States

    Contribution

    Data curation, Writing - review and editing

    Competing interests

    No competing interests declared

20. Pantel Vokonas

    Veterans Affairs Normative Aging Study, Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System, Department of Medicine, Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, United States

    Contribution

    Resources

    Competing interests

    No competing interests declared

21. Benjamin S Williams

    Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, United States

    Contribution

    Writing - review and editing

    Competing interests

    No competing interests declared

22. Terrie E Moffitt

    1. Social, Genetic, and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, London, United Kingdom
    2. Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, United States
    3. Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, United States
    4. Center for Genomic and Computational Biology, Duke University, Durham, United States

    Contribution

    Conceptualization, Resources, Funding acquisition, Writing - original draft, Writing - review and editing

    Competing interests

    No competing interests declared