Combining blood biochemistry and glycan ages for an even more prognostic biological age

Glycan and blood marker based biological ages are prognostic of health and survival. However, glycans and haematology measures (as opposed to blood biochemistry) are rarely available together in outcome based studies. Consequently, no dataset available to us could unify these biological age estimates. We therefore developed a new measure, PlasmaAge, using only biochemistry markers measured in ORCADES but trained within UK Biobank. In ORCADES, PlasmaAge, a glycan based age, and their composite all predicted mortality, improving AUC over chronological age alone by 0.026, 0.032, and 0.041 respectively. We confirmed these effects on mortality in Croatian cohorts. PlasmaAge provides a new estimate of biological ageing for studies where only biochemistry data are available. Moreover, we show that PlasmaAge and glycan-based age can be combined into a more prognostic composite biological age, suitable for use in both research and commercial settings.