Cheek, please!
A biotechnology company headquartered in Manhattan has developed an “aging” clock that uses information from the cells in your cheeks to predict your biological age.
Biological age is the age of your cells and tissues — this number can differ from your chronological age, which is the number of years you’ve been alive. Research has found that a large gap between your biological and chronological age can significantly increase your risk of death from disease.
Most biochemical tests that predict a person’s biological age rely on blood DNA, but Tally Health’s CheekAge is a noninvasive cheek swab.
For a study published Tuesday in Frontiers in Aging, Tally Health researchers tested their CheekAge technology using blood samples in a dataset where 1,500 UK senior citizens were tracked over time.
“In this current work, we show that our CheekAge clock, which was trained using cheek cells (buccal), is still highly significantly associated with mortality in blood,” Max Shokhirev, head of computational biology and data science at Tally Health, told The Post.
“This is especially interesting given that CheekAge was trained on a different tissue and given that the blood dataset we used for testing was missing roughly half of the inputs needed to predict CheekAge,” he added.
Shokhirev pointed out that CheekAge does not predict when you will die or how — it shows that the difference between your biological age and your chronological age is highly associated with mortality risk.
Every three years, the study participants had their blood tested for DNA methylation. The last available data point was used to calculate their CheekAge.
DNA methylation is a natural biological process where chemical tags are added to DNA — gene function can change while the genetic code remains the same.
DNA methylation levels change over time. Diet, hormones, stress, drugs and exposure to pollutants can influence this process.
Tally Health says CheekAge, which launched earlier this year, outcompeted four first-generation clocks developed years ago and was comparable to DNAm PhenoAge, a blood-trained predictor of chronic disease and mortality risk.
CheekAge serves as the basis for Tally Health’s TallyAge Test, a cheek swab kit available to consumers.
Tally Health found that a person’s CheekAge is associated with lifestyle factors such as sleep, exercise and alcohol consumption and health factors such as having COVID-19.
“We’re actively engaged in research to better understand what types of variables and metrics are significantly associated with CheekAge, including different diseases, health conditions and lifestyle factors,” Adiv Johnson, head of scientific affairs and education at Tally Health, told The Post.
