
A Spreadsheet for Calculating Your Levine Phenotypic Age
An excellent paper by M. E. Levine, et al, entitled "An epigenetic biomarker of aging for lifespan and healthspan" describes a technique for combining nine blood-work values with calendar age to calculate your Mortality Score (probability of death in the next ten years) and your Phenotypic Age, i.e., your apparent biological age as implied by your blood variables. The calculation procedure is rather arcane, involving non-obvious unit conversions, exponentials, and logarithms, so I have produced an Excel spreadsheet (LINK) for performing these calculations.
Levine, et al., also used an elaborate DNA analysis of many blood samples to find what they call the DNAm PhenoAge, a measure of the degree of DNA methylation present, a phenomenon associated with aging. They correlate this measure with the Phenotypic Age, showing that they track very well. My spreadsheet uses a fit to their plots to estimate your DNAm PhenoAge and the modified Mortality Score that it implies.
You may already have blood-work giving the nine blood variables needed to use this spreadsheet, but if not they can be obtained by purchasing the blood-work of LifeExtension's Chemistry Panel & Complete Blood Count (CBC) ($35) and their C-Reactive Protein (CRP), Cardiac ($42). On the spreadsheet at the upper line of blue numbers, you simply enter your values in place of the ones presently there and enter your decimal calendar age in the last column. The calculated results then appear in red on the last line.
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@ JGC
It is good to have started a fresh new thread on the Levine's paper and providing your calculator. Thank you again. However, I feel worth also to refer everyone to the thread started by Dan Mc on the same topic/paper where there is an important follow on discussion in particular about integration of several categories of possible biomarkers of aging (e.g. molecular, clinical, anthropometric, machine learning driven, ...), the role of inflammation as characterized by biomarkers as CRP and IL-6 and the intriguing role "geometric" factors as MCV/RDW have.
A nice follow up here could be to gather information on trends along the years rather that only measurement at one point in time as better tacking the interventions we are trying.
I have written to Dr Levine along these line (no reply yet) and wonder if you got a reply on the CRP vs. MCV/RDW role.
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Here's an useful small hack - put your numbers in and vary them to see how you can make your bio age go backwards and by what degree. For instance driving your glucose down by 10 points gives you an extra year (at least for my numbers). Higher albumin is better (liver function I believe), as is lower creatinine (indicating healthy kidneys). This can be useful as a tool for what to work on with your blood panel. For example weighing the value of driving glucose down compared to the difficulty (e.g. lifestyle) of doing so.
I think for me the takeaway is the this looks like a good way to estimate the biological age of your blood only. This should be combined with other measures (e.g. reaction time, cardiovascular health, VO2max, etc) to create an overall estimate of your biological age. For weighings, in the absence of better estimates they could all simply be averaged together.
For example, a typical 10 year old has excellent blood work, excellent cardio, balance, reaction time, etc and would come out as being 10 years old. But compare to a poor kid growing up in a nutrition starved environment, presumably that would reflect in their results (slow reaction time, blood work, etc) and they could come out older.
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JGC Is the current link to the spreadsheet based directly on the Levine algorithm, or your modified version where you tried to "correct" it to align more closely to the derived methylation profile? As I've posted before, the former is IMO more valuable as it is more directly related to actual health outocmes than the methylation profile; if this is the "modified" version, may I suggest/request that you post both versions and explain the difference?
(Thank you again for doing this at all!). -
Note about Downloading the Spreadsheet
In Chrome, if you click on the LINK above, a non-functional version of the spreadsheet appears on the screen in a new tab. However, at the upper right on that screen, there is a "Download" pull-down menu that can be used to download a functional version of the spreadsheet.
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albedo said:
JGC
Along the lines of the answer you got from Dr. Horvath (thank you), Dr. Levine answered my note on the relative roles played by the clinical biomarkers used for the phenotypic age calculation. While recognizing the RDW's big impact on the estimate, she warns the weights listed in the table were not standardized to allow for a direct comparison.JGC DanMcL
Thinking about the weights in Levine et al paper and the discussion here and in the previous thread on their relative importance, I wonder if you have any take on her reply that they are not standardized to allow for a direct comparison.
Happy and healthy new year!
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Thank you JGC for making this excellent spreadsheet.
From your calculations RDW, MCV and glucose are the top three markers affecting PhenoAge. It seems all three can be changed with dietary interventions, namely reducing iron, increasing HDL, and altering food choices to reduce insulin. I looked at my bloodwork from twelve years ago and I my PhenoAge has declined 10 years. I am now 57 with a PhenoAge of 45. My wife is 48 with a PhenoAge of 33.
With this new knowledge I will work on reducing iron further and see what the calculator has to say.
It might be useful for people to share their data and the slowest agers habits might then be able to be copied by others.
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Anyone here who tried to compare aging.ai and Levine's Phenotypic Age results?
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Thanks much JGC! Finally, a decent (r=.94 vs. .8 for aging.ai according to Mike Lustgarten, ie. much better correlation).
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Thanks for the great info JGC! I just got my bloodwork the other day but they gave me a BUN/creatinine ratio vs. just creatinine and I haven't been able to get the spreadsheet to work since I am retired and don't have a spreadsheet program. I have all the other info and would love to know my pheno age after a year on Met and 8 months on Rap. etc. Uping my DHEA, Zn, and HGH secretagogues after the Fahy art. Any suggestions anyone? I imagine if I call and pester them, I could get a creatinine value since they must have it since they have the ratio! I have been using fisetin, quercetin and PL as well as the LEF senolytic tabs, and NMN, etc., so am doing pretty good at 75.
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Dennis said:
Uping my DHEA, Zn, and HGH secretagogues after the Fahy art.What do you take as HGH secretagogues? Also have you ever checked also your IGF-1? Just curious, need to have that in good balance too, not too high, not too low.
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I used Google Sheets which worked great with the Excel file. I'm 58 years old. My AI3.0 age was 38, my Phenotypic age is 45.17 and my DNAage using a urine sample was 63! That last number is terrible and is in the >99 percentile. What the hell is with that? Something really wrong with my kidneys? All my lab work looks normal. 😲
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The relative important weight of RDW in Levine's Phenotypic Age might be possibly explained:
"...Variability in red blood cell (RBC) volumes (RBC distribution width: RDW) increases with age and is a strong predictor of mortality, incident CAD and cancer. In a study of 116,666 UK Biobank volunteers, genetic variants explained 29% of RDW individuals aged over 60 years and 33.8% of RDW in those aged < 50 years [222]. RDW was associated with 194 independent genetic signals (119 intronic), 71 implicated in autoimmune disease, body mass index, Alzheimer’s disease, longevity, age at menopause, bone density, myostasis, Parkinson’s disease and age-related macular degeneration. Pathway analysis showed enrichment for telomere maintenance, ribosomal RNA and apoptosis..."
Morris BJ, Willcox BJ, Donlon TA. Genetic and epigenetic regulation of human aging and longevity. Biochim Biophys Acta Mol Basis Dis. 2019;1865(7):1718-1744.
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What a great resource! I am very glad I found this discussion. I shared my results, along with a comparison to 2x other free online tests here:
http://www.nickengerer.org/longevity-and-wellness/three-biological-age-tests
For those of you having issues downloading the excel sheet above, I provided another link for getting it in my post.
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used the spreed sheet to order importance of variable without age for me(I think it is a correlated factor plus it is uncontrollable). Used a 10% improvement to look at the age improvement generated. Had a slightly different order than JGC. RDW and MCV still most important. Third/fourth factors related to kidney function, which based on my blood work is not surprising.
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I have seen the exel sheet that uses Levine's paramteres & coefficents to calculate
MortScore
What confuses me is a parameter "t" in years
I donot tunderstand the meaning of it.
For example, you can put 10 years or 20 years.
Mortality Score changes. And that is expected. The longer the time frame, the higher the probability of mortality.
However, the resulting phenoage also changes. That does not make sense to me.
Can someone please explain?
Thank You
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Hi Folks, just wanted to let you know that we put Dr.Levine spreadsheet into a free and simple to use web page (click here).
Want to make this accessible to everyone, so we have also negotiated wholesale price with Quest Labs for anyone who wants to get their bloodwork done. You would get the 9 biomarkers required for the Levine clock (plus additional 18 markers, 27 total) . This including blood-draw and doctor order for $75 (and since we just launched today - happy to give anyone on the forum $15 off - use coupon AgeReversal). You can learn more here -
Hello,
I started Hyperbaric oxygen therapy following the israeli study that it improved telomere lengths and reduced senescent cells. I am trying to get blood work done that combines blood glucose, lipid panel, RBC, WBC , testetrrone, CRP, as well as telomere and senescent cell level testing - so far i have not been able to find a lab test that covers all these. As I already started with HBOT session, i am in a rush to find an option that one stop shop that tests for all the above biomarkers to baseline at the beginning of HBOT and then again at end of 60 sessions of HBOT...if any one has a recommendation, kindly share.