Population Specific Biomarkers of Human Aging: A Big Data Study Using South Korean, Canadian, and Eastern European Patient Populations

Accurate and physiologically meaningful biomarkers for human aging are key to assessing antiaging therapies. Given ethnic differences in health, diet, lifestyle, behavior, environmental exposures, and even average rate of biological aging, it stands to reason that aging clocks trained on datasets obtained from specific ethnic populations are more likely to account for these potential confounding factors, resulting in an enhanced capacity to predict chronological age and quantify biological age. Here, we present a deep learning-based hematological aging clock modeled using the large combined dataset of Canadian, South Korean, and Eastern European population blood samples that show increased predictive accuracy in individual populations compared to population specific hematologic aging clocks. The performance of models was also evaluated on publicly available samples of the American population from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). In addition, we explored the association between age predicted by both population specific and combined hematological clocks and all-cause mortality. Overall, this study suggests (a) the population specificity of aging patterns and (b) hematologic clocks predicts all-cause mortality. The proposed models were added to the freely-available Aging.AI system expanding the range of tools for analysis of human aging.