Can These Tests Really Tell You Your ‘Biological Age'?

Ads for biological age tests that promise to tell you if you have the body of somebody younger or older than your birthdays may suggest abound online these days.While the marketing tactics vary, these tests often promise that a blood draw, a cheek swab, or a urine sample is all it takes to determine if your middle-aged body is actually disguising a person who is biologically in their twenties or their eighties. Many of these tests cost hundreds of dollars up front, often with a bigger price tag for extras like monitoring your biological age over time or providing targeted advice on how to make your biological age even younger.

"There are a bajillion of these tests out there," says Jessie Poganik, PhD , an instructor at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, who studies biological age clocks. "We will get to the point where they are useful tools for individual people. We aren't quite there, but it is just a matter of time."

What Biological Age Tests Measure

Broadly speaking, biological age tests aim to assess your health based on how well your body functions rather than how many birthdays you've celebrated.

Depending on your chronological age, the idea of these tests may have been around longer than you've been alive. The British scientist Alex Comfort, perhaps best known for his book The Joy of Sex , published a landmark paper in 1969 proposing that a battery of tests might help assess how quickly people age.

Since then, scientists have tried - and cast aside - a wide variety of potential methods for testing biological age. One method that was popular for many years but has fallen out of favor, for example, was based on looking at the length of telomeres, which are sections of DNA at the end of our chromosomes. This was built on the theory that shorter telomeres might indicate an older biological age than longer ones.

"Now we know that if you have shorter telomeres, you are at risk of heart disease, and if you have longer telomeres, you are at risk of cancer," says Nir Barzilai, MD , director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City.

"We know there may be better tests for biological age than telomeres."

Telomeres aren't a big focus of biological age tests anymore because their length doesn't appear to correlate directly with aging or longevity, Barzilai says.

Today scientists are focused on using a so-called epigenetic clock, an idea proposed in 2013 by Steve Horvath, PhD , a professor of human genetics and biostatistics at the University of California Los Angeles. It's based on the biologic process known as DNA methylation, which involves molecular changes over time that turn different genes on and off. Some changes that happen with DNA methylation may age the body faster, while others may slow aging down.

"Epigenetic ages based on methylation of DNA are the clocks most widely embraced today," says Douglas Vaughan, MD , a professor emeritus and director of the Potocsnak Longevity Institute at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.

What Biological Age Tests Claim to Offer

We all have that friend from high school who still looks like they did senior year, and we all know somebody else from back in the day who went prematurely gray and hasn't aged well at all.

"There's a general appreciation that people have had forever that not everybody ages at the same rate," Vaughan says. "Over the last 20 years, we have started to develop a series of tools to help really define and clarify biological versus chronological age."

The science is still too new for people to just go online or run to the store and buy a biological aging test, and then get an accurate result that will tell them exactly what to do to live longer. So as far as those tests that may be advertised online go: Buyer, beware, Poganik says. That's because epigenetic clocks at this point do more to help scientists research aging processes than to tell individual consumers about their own health.

But scientists anticipate getting there in another decade or so, Poganik says. The holy grail of this research is to not just identify the best predictors of premature aging, but then to develop new approaches that can slow down processes in the body that accelerate aging, Poganik adds.

"When people think of aging products. they think of anti-aging skin cream in the drugstore," Poganik says. "But the reality is there is an actively growing scientific community that is looking to target biological aging to improve people's lives."

Do Biological Age Tests Work?

Although epigenetic clocks looking at DNA methylation are considered the gold standard in scientific research right now, it's still possible to get a different biological age from each test you buy because they're still new, and their methods, while promising, haven't all been independently tested and validated, Poganik says.

"The pros are it will give you one data point that you may find informative in terms of your own life and making you aware that you need to do things to potentially preserve your health," says Vaughan, adding that one potential con is it could be inaccurate. "It could give you information that could make you miss a serious problem that isn't measured by that particular test."

At the Human Longevity Laboratory at Northwestern, Vaughan's research team looks at biological age based on AI analysis of results from tests of multiple systems in the body on top of DNA methylation tests. They use electrocardiograms (ECGs) to look at cardiovascular systems, retinal images, echocardiogram images of the heart, and digitized videos of gait and balance.

"Taken together, these tools provide us with the most sophisticated and comprehensive array of tests for measuring biological age in humans," Vaughan says.

For the most actionable outcomes, however, people would need to do testing more than once so they can see if any changes they make in their lives result in slowing down or speeding up their aging processes. Vaughan's lab is starting to study people in the Chicago area to see how specific interventions recommended after initial biological aging tests impact the results of follow-up assessments.

A recent analysis of research to date in this nascent field identified several age-related diseases, mental health conditions, and socioeconomic factors that are associated with increased biological age.

It also highlighted interventions with some research on their potential to decrease biological age such as low-calorie or plant-based diets, lifestyle changes involving exercise, or taking vitamin D3 supplements for those who are overweight with low vitamin D levels or the diabetes drug metformin .

Are There Other Ways to Calculate Your Biological Age?

While there's no single test you can get from your doctor that's designed specifically to assess your biological age, there are ways to focus on how well the major systems in your body have fared over time.

For example, the American Heart Association recommends a cardiovascular risk calculator to assess your risk of events like heart attacks and strokes over the next decade. It's not designed to assess biological age, but may help tell you how well your cardiovascular system is aging, Vaughan says.

Similarly, there are several tests of physical strength - like grip strength,

how long you can hold a plank ,

or how many times you can stand up from sitting in a chair over a set period of time - that offer a picture of how well your muscles have aged and a snapshot of how well systems regulating your balance and coordination work.

Sleep studies, eye exams, and hearing tests can also help fill in this picture.

None of these tests paint a perfect picture of biological age, but they offer some information you can act on that may help prolong your life, Vaughan says."There are all of these things you can do in a routine way to quantify the extent to which various systems in your body are aging well," Vaughan says. "There are also the kinds of hygienic things you can do that keep you healthy and are safe and effective in terms of perhaps slowing down your velocity of aging - keeping your weight in a normal range, exercising regularly , getting good sleep , trying to minimize stressors in life - and all of those things add up."

The Takeaway

Biological age tests are seemingly everywhere, but the ones you can buy don't necessarily give you enough information to make smart choices about your health. Scientists see huge research for these tests right now, but don't anticipate them informing personal health decisions for individual consumers in a reliable way for several years. In the meantime, you can focus on longevity by taking other preventive health measures - like getting recommended physicals, health screenings, and vaccines, along with eating healthy, maintaining a healthy weight, having a support network, managing stress, exercising regularly, avoiding smoking, and others.

Editorial Sources and Fact-Checking

Everyday Health follows strict sourcing guidelines to ensure the accuracy of its content, outlined in our editorial policy . We use only trustworthy sources, including peer-reviewed studies, board-certified medical experts, patients with lived experience, and information from top institutions.

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Justin Laube, MD

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Justin Laube, MD, is a board-certified integrative and internal medicine physician, a teacher, and a consultant with extensive expertise in integrative health, medical education, and trauma healing.

He graduated with a bachelor's in biology from the University of Wisconsin and a medical degree from the University of Minnesota Medical School. During medical school, he completed a graduate certificate in integrative therapies and healing practices through the Earl E. Bakken Center for Spirituality & Healing. He completed his three-year residency training in internal medicine at the University of California in Los Angeles on the primary care track and a two-year fellowship in integrative East-West primary care at the UCLA Health Center for East-West Medicine.

He is currently taking a multiyear personal and professional sabbatical to explore the relationship between childhood trauma, disease, and the processes of healing. He is developing a clinical practice for patients with complex trauma, as well as for others going through significant life transitions. He is working on a book distilling the insights from his sabbatical, teaching, and leading retreats on trauma, integrative health, mindfulness, and well-being for health professionals, students, and the community.

Previously, Dr. Laube was an assistant clinical professor at the UCLA Health Center for East-West Medicine and the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, where he provided primary care and integrative East-West medical consultations. As part of the faculty, he completed a medical education fellowship and received a certificate in innovation in curriculum design and evaluation. He was the fellowship director at the Center for East-West Medicine and led courses for physician fellows, residents, and medical students.

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Lisa Rapaport

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Lisa Rapaport is a journalist with more than 20 years of experience on the health beat as a writer and editor. She holds a master's degree from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and spent a year as a Knight-Wallace journalism fellow at the University of Michigan. Her work has appeared in dozens of local and national media outlets, including Reuters, Bloomberg, WNYC, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times , Scientific American , San Jose Mercury News , Oakland Tribune , Huffington Post, Yahoo! News, The Sacramento Bee , and The Buffalo News . … See full bio See Our Editorial Policy Meet Our Health Expert Network