Biological Age and Five Year Mortality Risk

[Guest Rodney]

http://www.ubble.co.uk/

 

There is another calculation of biological age and five year mortality risk here.

 

For those aged 40 to 70.  (I had to lie about my age to take it!)

 

Rodney.

 

[Saul]

I had to lie as well, probably for the opposite reason that you did (because I'll be 76 on June 18).  The calculator estimated that I had a 3.5% chance of dying in the next 5 years, and that my risk of dying in the next 5 years was similar to an average Briton aged 55.

 

:)

 

  -- Saul

[Guest Rodney]

HA!  I had to lie because I am 73.

 

And my results appear to be very nearly exactly the same as yours - 3.4% and 55! 

[nicholson]

Apparently huge variations in aging rates, and the resulting differences in biological age among people born around the same time:

 

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-33409604

 

Rodney.

[Zeta]

Thanks for the link, Rodney. Here's the full paper:

 

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/07/01/1506264112.full.pdf

 

Zeta

[Michael R]

There's an interesting interview about the UK Longevity Explorer on the Australian Broadcasting Company's excellent "Health Report" podcast.

 

The alleged biological age score used in the BBC story and underlying PNAS paper is nothing of the sort: the subjects are way too young (there's no tracking of outcomes after the 'knee' in the mortality curve, let alone maximum lifespan). Note that the subjects in this study were evaluated for mortality for the 12 y after the age of 38. It's well-established (and expected from theory) that environmental and lifestyle influences exert a very substantial effect on risk of death before the age of 75 or so, with only 25% of mortality risk being attributed to genetics, whereas the effect of lifestyle progressively lessens at greater ages, and genetics having a substantial effect for a few extreme outliers (folks in whose families centenarians run). This is presumably because as you age the multiple synergistic contributors to aging are snowballing, leading to the "visible" acceleration of mortality rates at the "knee" in the survival curve, and the exponential effect of aging overcomes the non-exponential effect of lifestyle.

In the first few decades after clean water, sanitation, and antibiotics dramatically reduced childhood and young-adult mortality in the industrialized world, we used to have horrendously high rates of CVD mortality before the age of 60, due mostly to smoking followed by saturated fat intake and uncontrolled hypertension; all of these came down starting in the 1970s, and CVD rates fell precipitously, with most of the benefit coming to younger people. Statins then came online on a population level in the 90s, leading to further progress. But people still get CVD, and the prevalence rises with age across the population.

Similarly, we all know from our own experience of substantial visible variation in how old people seem to look in their forties thru' their sixties -- but with rare exceptions, people in their 80s and beyond look and function within much narrower range of frailty.

 

Note that very nearly all of the constituent elements in the score are readily modifiable with lifestyle: VO2max, FEV1, total and HDL-C & TG, CRP, waist-to-hip ratio and BMI, mean leukocyte telomere length, periodontal disease, apoB100 lipoproteins -- which is almost everything, and I just don't happen to know about WBC (except in people on CR), BUN, and creatinine clearance at younger agees. And, of course, these also drive early variability to age-related disease.

 

This is the usual confusion that leads to so many articles saying you can "slow aging" with excercise and a good but not CR diet. These affect baseline mortality (α component in the Gompertz curve), but not the rate of aging (β-component), which is a product of more fundamental metabolic processes. Ie, they affect mortality risk, but don't affect the exponential growth of said risk with age.