Chronological Age
How old you are measured in years since you were born
Biological age
How old you are biologically, in other words how old your body is, a key pointer to your health span and lifespan prospects
This is real. And part of the developing science around ageing and longevity. Your health age is not necessarily the same as your birth age. In fact, it can be very different. So, when you celebrate your 55th birthday, for example, that is a ‘marker’ of how long it is since you were born.
But your body may be older or younger than this, you could be ‘health wise’ age 40 or age 70. This is what is known as your biological age.
If you can discover accurately your biological age it can help you understand
- How fit you are generally
- How quickly or slowly you are ageing
- Your prospects for a long life
- Your prospects for ill-health during your lifetime
- The risks you face of certain chronic conditions
- What you need to do to improve your position (and this is true even for those that are ‘younger’ than their actual age)
Tests to uncover your ageing profile
There are base tests you can do that have been around for years.
Below are a few links to some sites and online services that will help you, but these are relatively unsophisticated and general in nature. They are still worth looking at – as anything that concentrates your attention on your health and fitness and making this better is worth exploring. However, we recommend that you should go further and properly explore all the modern, in many cases NEW, sophisticated tests and scans.
One of the benefits of the tests above, quick and easy to do, is that you can change your answers to see what difference this makes to the calculation. For example, if you are stressed, drink more alcohol than the average, and rarely exercise (all the true answers) but you then adjust by saying you are relaxed, don’t drink alcohol and you exercise intensely (all untrue) – you can then compare before and after and see how this changes your biological age. It could shift it in some cases by ten years, therefore telling you what you need to do to radically alter your prospects. It may seem obvious but this is an advantage of these basic calculators.
Nothing, though, compares to getting to know yourself intimately and this is where you explore the sophisticated options. Using modern science and exceptional biometrics.
There are many and they come at this from a number of different angles:
In addition to these various tests and scans, there are all the options available from both public and private healthcare advisers.
You should maximise all free tests from your health service, these include holistic check-ups, covering all aspects of your health or specific marker checks looking at individual aspects, such as checking for diabetes, cancer, heart disease more specifically.
To learn more about the advancing science see our page more about the most modern health tests