Several things, here.
First, despite what people keep saying, this is not a biological age score. They used machine learning to try to get a panel of tests that would predict chronological age — that's all — and didn't do a terribly impressive job at that: the mean absolute error for getting someone's age within a 10-year frame is about six years.
Even if it got this spot-on, that's not remotely what people are looking for. A good biological aging score would accurately predict mortality (and preferably morbidity) in basically healthy community-dwelling people, and would do so better than their chronological age. Ideally, it would track the accelerating increase in mortality rate across the lifespan from middle-age onward. They haven't yet even attempted to do any of this yet: again, they've just tried to construct a score that correlates well with chronological age.
Second, as regards the extensive discussion that triggered this thread:
It's very unlikely, just based on timeframe alone, that this was the test mentioned by Sinclair.
Even if one had a very robust biological aging score, there's no sense taking a single test as implying anything about the effects of some intervention on biological age. To do that, even on an n=1 basis, you at minimum need a pre- and post-intervention result — and better still, a pre-, a post-, and a discontinuation, to see if you had durably bent the curve. And of course, you wouldn't want to have made any other changes in the meantime.
I'm quite surprised to hear all the people saying that their blood tests don't include most of the components of the aging.AI. What are people getting tested? A basic cholesterol panel, complete blood count, and comprehensive metabolic panel will cover all of it: those are the absolute minimum, most important tests for anyone with any interest at all in knowing if they're going to drop dead in the next five years, let alone someone engaged in any effort to experimentally manipulate their future life expectancy. If you're doing a lot of experimental things in hopes of living longer and not monitoring these, you're a Damned Fool, and if you're ordering a bunch of fancy tests and not getting these, you are the same species of Damned Fool as a person who is slowly racking up credit card debt but makes sure s/he keeps up with hir 401(k) every month.
FWIW, the only decent biological aging score of which I'm aware are the composite Frailty Indexes built up in different publications by Rockwood and Mitnitski (see here, here, here, here, and here). However, it's mostly been validated in elderly people, and may not be sensitive enough for significant effects of metabolically-based interventions; it's also a much more complicated construct than a simple blood test.
I've just seen pamojja's comment that there is already a thread on this. Nate, with your permission, may I merge this thread into that?
Edited by Michael, 02 May 2017 - 08:22 PM.