Approved Research

Validation and optimisation of "blood-age" risk assessment metric

Lay summary

Aim - We aim to validate the "blood-age" risk stratification metric based on blood-biomarker levels for predicting clinically relevant outcomes (i.e. presence of any (chronic) disease, number of (chronic) diseases, incidence of disease, all-cause mortality) in UK-biobank participants.

Rationale/duration -We employed the concept of risk/hazard ratio to years of life added/subtracted transformation to constructing the "blood-age" risk stratification metric. The "blood-age" metric takes the value of 13 selected blood biomarkers present in an individual, transforms the risk associated with the value of each biomarker to years added/subtracted and sums the 13 values to form a cumulative "blood-age" score.

The risk stratification "blood-age" metric correlates with the presence of any (chronic) disease and with the number of (chronic) diseases in a NHANES dataset. To validate the metric in a novel, independent population we will test the metric on a dataset of UK-biobank participants and correlate it with i.) the presence of any chronic disease, ii.) with the number of chronic diseases iii.) with chronic disease incidence and iv.) with all cause-mortality. Furthermore, we will optimize the metric by i.) identifying novel biomarkers that add to the discrimination ability of the metric ii.) identifying combinations of biomarkers and iii.) fine-tuning the weighted contributions of biomarkers that add to the discrimination ability of the metric to clinically relevant outcomes.

The whole process of "blood-age" risk metric validation and optimisation will be conducted during a period of 12 months.

Benefits - The validation of the "blood age" metric with additional optimization of the metric will result in a valid risk stratification tool estimating the biological age of individuals which could be used to guide tailored health interventions.