Your birthday counts years. It does not measure how your body is holding up, and it cannot tell you whether the last two years of your habits helped or hurt. There is a measurement that can.
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The case for measuring it
The rest comes from what you eat, how you sleep, how much you move, how much stress you carry, and what you breathe. Those inputs do not change your DNA sequence. They change which genes are switched on and off, through a chemical process called methylation.
That process leaves a record. Read the methylation pattern and you are reading an account of how your body has actually been treated, rather than an estimate based on how long you have been alive.
Chronological age is a poor guide to health because the spread around it is enormous. Among people who share a birth year, measured biological age commonly ranges across two decades. Some are running ahead of the calendar. Some are well behind it. Nobody can tell which group they are in by looking in the mirror.
A biological age reading tells you where you stand. Pace of aging tells you the direction you are heading right now. It comes out of the Dunedin Study, which followed a thousand people from birth and tracked how fast their organ systems declined.
A pace of 1.0 means you are accumulating one year of biological aging per calendar year. Below 1.0 means you are running slower than the calendar. It is the reading that responds to what you change, which is why it is worth establishing a baseline before you change anything.
The first epigenetic clock was published by Steve Horvath at UCLA in 2013. Since then, methylation based measures of age have been tested against large long running population studies, and higher epigenetic age relative to chronological age has been associated with greater risk of age related disease.
What changed recently is access. The measurement used to require a research lab and a study enrollment. Now it requires a finger prick and a mailer.
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Where these numbers come from
OMICmAge was developed by the Channing Division of Network Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, using routine clinical data from roughly 31,000 participants in the Mass General Brigham Biobank. It was published in Nature Aging in February 2026.
Established that a methylation based measure of biological age is associated with both incident and prevalent chronic disease and with mortality, performing comparably to or better than the biomarkers that came before it.
Channing Division of Network Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School
Ages 11 organ systems separately rather than producing one number for the whole body, using 133 molecular, cellular, and functional biomarkers across 125,000 methylation sites. This is what tells you your brain is tracking younger than your heart.
Developed by Yale scientists including Albert Higgins-Chen, MD, PhD
Built from the Dunedin Study, which has followed roughly a thousand people born in 1972 and 1973 for their entire lives, measuring organ system decline at repeated intervals. It is the source of the pace of aging reading.
Validated against decades of longitudinal follow up
TruDiagnostic holds the largest private DNA methylation database in the world. Every test run adds to it, which is what allows your result to be scored against a real population rather than a reference range borrowed from someone else's study.
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How you measure it
Your sample is processed in a CLIA certified and CAP accredited lab. You get your biological age, your pace of aging, and the age of 11 organ systems including brain, heart, lung, and liver.
Everything you need shows up within a week, packaged discreetly.
A finger prick onto a collection card. Drop it in the mail.
75+ biomarkers and what to change about them, in 2 to 3 weeks.
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TruAge is a wellness test and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Results are for informational purposes only and are not medical advice.