A strategy for identification of biomarkers of healthy aging

Different physical, cellular and molecular measures are expected to show different patterns in healthy vs. unhealthy individuals. For some measures, higher is better; for others, lower is better; and for some others the closer to an ideal value, the better. Quantities that vary around an ideal value in human populations could be expected to show what we call a ‘sweet spot’. We have observed sweet spots in ‘Super-Seniors’, exceptionally health individuals 85 or older. We hypothesize that the sweet spots can be used to identify or prioritize biological markers of healthy aging in complex data sets. We propose to test for sweet spots in data from the CLSA.