The Kronos Longitudinal Aging Study
Future Current provides a transcript for an interesting presentation from a few years back: "To be practically useful, the measurement of aging rate (by monitoring the decline of a global index of functional capacity, expressed as a rate function) must be relatively easy and inexpensive. Measured aging rate should enable empirical testing of purported anti-aging interventions in relatively short-term human clinical trials. ... The reason people don't make it to a hundred is because we don't age in our own bodies uniformly. You have different processes that are declining at different paces. In this case, this gentleman's cardiovascular system declined prematurely (this happens quite often) and hit the threshold for the viability of his cardiovascular system with a heart attack and died at age 65. He might have had perfectly good bones and perfectly good muscle, but he is just as dead at 65 and was cheated out of an extra thirty years of lifespan because his weakest link bumped him off early. Traditional medicine identifies those problems late in the game and intervenes in targeted ways to address the symptoms of the disease. If they are successful they can buy a few additional years. What we suggest as a better approach is to identify those degenerative processes as early as possible and use targeted interventions as early as possible to head it off at the pass, offering the individual many more years of healthy life expectancy."