“Health-age”: a novel measure of healthy aging in older Canadian adults

There is a pressing need to develop tools that will allow our health care system to function more efficiently by helping identify those older adults that are at the highest risk of adverse health. One approach would be to follow specific biological markers (biomarkers) that are known to be related to a given disease or illness. However, because older adults are at risk for a myriad of conditions, it is probably not feasible to monitor them all. A better approach would be to use these biomarkers in tandem to gauge an individual’s overall risk for adverse health; in a sense, whether they are aging in a healthy or unhealthy manner. Hence, we propose an improved method for characterizing an individual’s health state that uses multiple health-related biomarkers to estimate how old someone is based on how healthy they are. If this “health-age” is greater than their chronological age, that person is likely at a greater risk of disease or illness.