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Beauty & Health Editor
Beauty & Health Editor
Hannah Frye is the Beauty & Health Editor at mindbodygreen. She has a B.S. in journalism and a minor in women’s, gender, and queer studies from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. Hannah has written across lifestyle sections including beauty, women’s health, mental health, sustainability, social media trends, and more. She previously worked for Almost 30, a top-rated health and wellness podcast. In her current role, Hannah reports on the latest beauty trends and innovations, women’s health research, brain health news, and plenty more.
Image by Aleksandra Jankovic / Stocksy
October 10, 2024
At-home biological age tests estimate the age of your body’s cells—and this number could be very different from the chronological age you celebrated on your last birthday. These tests are becoming more popular among health-focused crowds, but one big question still remains: Does our biological age actually tell us anything about how long (and how well) we’ll live?
According to research, it may actually be more telling than you think, especially for brain health in your later years.
There may be a link between biological age and dementia
Researchers used data from 325,870 participants in the UK Biobank, a large-scale biomedical database. To determine biological age, they took into account 18 different clinical biomarkers, including blood sugar, blood lipids, blood pressure, lung function, and other measures of cardiometabolic health.
Researchers determined how old the participants’ bodies seemed based on biological measures of health (that were unrelated to their chronological age) to find out if a higher biological age put them at an increased risk of dementia and other common neurodegenerative diseases. Results showed that a higher biological age was linked to a higher risk of dementia and stroke.
This was an observational study, so a directly causal relationship between biological age and dementia and stroke can’t be confirmed quite yet. However, this finding does suggest that tending to your cardiometabolic health may slow down or prevent the onset of dementia, stroke, and other brain-related diseases.
Why this can be helpful
It’s not breaking news that factors like blood sugar and lung function contribute to disease onset. Still, it’s helpful to understand the health implications of having a biological age that’s higher than your chronological age. In the future, biological age tests may help health care providers determine patients’ disease risk and get them on preventive treatments earlier.
It’s worth noting that biological age tests, whether completed at home or in a health care setting, are not the only measure of disease risk—other factors, including lifestyle, genetics, current chronic illness, demographics, and family history, all play a role. And more research is needed on the relationship between biological age and risk for other chronic health conditions beyond the brain.
Still, this study shows us that getting older doesn’t necessarily have to mean getting sicker. It’s a reminder that aging doesn’t need to be associated with disease—at least when looking at it through the lens of biology.
The takeaway
A BMJ study found that advanced biological age increases the risk of subsequent neurodegenerative diagnoses, including all-cause dementia, ischaemic stroke, and ALS. If you want to learn more about biological age tests (and the best at-home options), check out this guide. You can also tune in to the mindbodygreen podcast episode below to learn more about reversing biological age from naturopathic doctor Kara Fitzgerald, N.D.