Improving the precision of biological age determinations. Part 2: Automatic human tests, age norms and variability

In order to eliminate variability due to test operators, procedures for measuring 12 physiological functions that are candidate biomarkers of aging have been automated. Data was collected from a norm group of 2462 male and female office workers using an instrument which requires no test operators, administers all 12 tests in about 45 min. per subject, computes biological age, prints out results, and stores data on floppy disks for transfer to other computers for analysis. This report a) describes the instrumentation and test procedures, b) presents normal age/sex standards for each of the 12 biomarkers, c) reports the variance of the data for each biomarker by sex, d) lists sources of biomarker variance, e) discusses criteria for biomarker selection and f) examines implications for information loss when biomarker data is combined to calculate biological age. After eliminating chronological age as a variable, the standard deviations of the frequency distributions of predicted age for individual biomarkers were found to vary from .226 to 1.075, a range of more than 4 to 1. Procedures are discussed for improving the ratio of useful-to-useless variance in calculating biological age.