Researchers at UCLA built a blood test that estimates biological age not from a single marker but from a composite of several, designed specifically to predict how long someone has left to live.
The test, called DNAm GrimAge, combines seven DNA-methylation-based estimates of blood proteins with an estimate of lifetime smoking exposure. In large validation datasets covering thousands of people, GrimAge predicted time to death more strongly than any earlier epigenetic clock, along with time to coronary heart disease, time to cancer, and age at menopause.
People whose GrimAge ran ahead of their birth age, a gap called age acceleration, also carried more chronic conditions and worse markers of diet and education, tying the test to real-world outcomes rather than an abstract number. UCLA holds a patent on the method, disclosed in the paper, and the clock is now used widely in other labs, though it estimates risk rather than any one person's exact future.
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One blood draw, a sharper read on risk.
Source
- Lu, A. T., Quach, A., Wilson, J. G., Reiner, A. P., Aviv, A., Raj, K., Hou, L., Baccarelli, A. A., Li, Y., Stewart, J. D., Whitsel, E. A., Assimes, T. L., Ferrucci, L., & Horvath, S. (2019). DNA methylation GrimAge strongly predicts lifespan and healthspan. Aging, 11(2), 303–327. https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.101684