Non-epigenetic biological-age testing

What it is

Non-epigenetic biological-age testing estimates how old a body is functioning without reading DNA methylation, which sets it apart from the epigenetic clocks. Two approaches dominate. Phenotypic-age scores are computed from routine blood chemistry: Levine's PhenoAge combines nine standard labs, among them albumin, creatinine, glucose and C-reactive protein, with chronological age (Levine et al., Aging, 2018). Organ-specific clocks instead read plasma proteins to age individual organs, work developed at Stanford (Oh et al., Nature, 2023; Nature Medicine, 2025), where accelerated organ aging tracked later mortality. Because they run on ordinary bloodwork or a single proteomic panel, both are cheaper than methylation arrays and validate against mortality at least as well. They inherit the same gap all the same: the numbers predict risk, but no trial shows that lowering one changes what happens to the person.