A new approach to the concept and computation of biological age

The lack of exact definition of the concept of biological age (BA) is a typical feature of works concerning BA. That is why comparison of results of various published methods makes little sense and eventual proof of their optimality is impossible. Based on natural and simple presumptions, an attempt to express mathematically the supposed relation between chronological age (CA) and BA has proven to be unexpectedly fruitful. In the present paper, an optimum method of estimation of BA, which is easily applicable even in nonlinear cases, is derived. Moreover, the method allows evaluating the precision of the estimates and also offers tools for validation of presumptions of the method. A special feature of the method is that CA should be used as a standard biomarker, leading to essential improving the precision of BA-estimate and illuminating relativity of the known 11 paradox of biomarkers". All theoretical results of the method were fully approved by means of a special simulation program. Further, the theory and the results of the simulation have proven that many published results of BA-estimates using multiple linear regression (MLR) are very probably disserviceable because CA is typically more precise estimate of BA than estimates computed by MLR. This unpleasant conclusion also concerns methods, which use MLR as the final step after transformation of the battery of biomarkers by factor analysis or by principal component analysis. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.