SystemsAge
Reviewed by Maurice Lichtenberg
SystemsAge is a multi-organ biological-age framework introduced by Tian and colleagues (2023, Nature Aging) that uses routine clinical laboratory data to generate organ-specific age estimates—covering brain, cardiovascular, kidney, liver, lung, immune, and metabolic systems—from blood-based biomarker panels. Rather than a single composite score, it produces a profile of organ biological ages, allowing detection of discordant ageing across systems. In the UK Biobank, organ age gaps predicted organ-specific disease and all-cause mortality; individuals whose organ ages were globally younger than their chronological age showed lower mortality risk. The approach is attractive for scalable population studies because it relies on standard blood tests rather than DNA methylation arrays or imaging.
