A toolkit for quantification of biological age from blood-chemistry and organ-function-test data: BioAge

Methods to quantify biological aging are emerging as new measurement tools for epidemiology and population science and have been proposed as surrogate measures for healthy lifespan extension in geroscience clinical trials. Publicly available software packages to compute biological aging measurements from DNA methylation data have accelerated dissemination of these measures and generated rapid gains in knowledge about how different measures perform in a range of datasets. Biological age measures derived from blood chemistry data were introduced at the same time as the DNA methylation measures and, in multiple studies, demonstrate superior performance to these measures in prediction of healthy lifespan. However, their dissemination has been slow by comparison, resulting in a significant gap in knowledge. We developed a software package to help address this knowledge gap. The BioAge R package, available for download at GitHub (http://github.com/dayoonkwon/BioAge), implements three published methods to quantify biological aging based on analysis of chronological age and mortality risk: Klemera-Doubal Biological Age, PhenoAge, and homeostatic dysregulation. The package allows users to parametrize measurement algorithms using custom sets of biomarkers, to compare the resulting measurements to published versions of the Klemera-Doubal method and PhenoAge algorithms, and to score the measurements in new datasets. We applied BioAge to safety lab data from the CALERIETM randomized controlled trial, the first-ever human trial of long-term calorie restriction in healthy, non-obese adults, to test effects of intervention on biological aging. Results contribute evidence that CALERIE intervention slowed biological aging. BioAge is a toolkit to facilitate measurement of biological age for geroscience.