Regulation or Certification

Scientists therefore feel that a strong need exists for either better consumer education or guidance from trained healthcare professionals who can help people interpret their results.

When people discover that they appear to be biologically older, for instance, that may fuel health anxiety. “I’ve had patients who absolutely had a psychological crisis,” says Maier. “They think it’s a death sentence if a clock shows that they’re 10 years older.”

Maier cautions that a single age estimate from one clock is not especially informative. Instead, results from multiple clocks combined with functional health metrics such as VO2max, a measure of respiratory health, will provide a more accurate overview.

“We need to look at different organs,” says Furman. “One overall age number doesn’t help, you need to know more granular details. For example, if the heart is plus five [years] it's suffering. If you have minus three [years] for the kidneys, that’s protecting you.”

Consumers also need to understand that biological age estimates can vary over the course of the day, meaning that if you’re repeating a test, it’s important to do so at the same time of day. The estimates can also fluctuate in response to things like physical activity. As an example, one 2025 study which used DNA methylation clocks to assess the biological ages of professional German soccer players discovered that if the tests were taken immediately after a match, they appeared biologically much younger, perhaps due to the physiological changes that occur in response to intense exercise. However, when retaken a few hours later, the measurements had returned to normal.

At the same time, not all biological aging tests, even those used in research, are ready for prime time. Furman says that proteomic clocks, which attempt to estimate age based on the levels of thousands of proteins in the blood, are still notoriously unreliable.

The commercial landscape has also been muddied by a proliferation of companies launching algorithms which purport to estimate biological age using selfies or surveys, and are not based on any real science at all. “With every smart device, if you download a couple of apps, it claims to tell you how old you really are,” says Maier. “This is very often nonsense. Everybody can say they have a new age matrix and offer it without external validation.”

Maier is unsure whether the solution is consumer education or regulation. One possible way forward may be certification where legitimate biological aging tests, which yield metrics that have been shown to be both reproducible and modifiable with different therapeutic interventions, are given a gold stamp by an international consortium of experts.

But while some aspects of the industry may at times feel akin to a Wild West, Maier is encouraged by the underlying science. She is adamant that biological aging clocks have a major role to play in preventative medicine in the coming years.

“My opinion is that there's a huge opportunity to measure the health of aging individuals before diseases occur,” she says. “At your age, my age, we absolutely should know how our body is functioning.”

Thank you to David Cox for additional research and reporting on this article.