Why biological clocks get our 'true age' wrong – and how AI could help

Why biological clocks get our'true age' wrong - and how AI could help Your chronological age can't always tell you the state of your health, which is why biological clocks have been developed to show our risk of developing diseases or dying - but they're not all they are cracked up to be, says columnist Graham Lawton You may be chronologically older than your "true age" When I first started writing about ageing years ago, there was a buzz around something called biological clocks, also known as ageing clocks or "true age" measurements. In principle, these are quite simple: we all have a chronological age, the number of years since birth, but this doesn't necessarily reflect how far we are down the slippery slope from birth to decrepitude. On average, this follows a fairly predictable trajectory, with gradual declines in almost every physical and mental attribute throughout adulthood. When we judge how old somebody is, we are intuitively totting up many of these tell-tale signs we see - the wrinkles and grey hair, or changes in posture, gait, voice, mental acuity and so on. The goal of measuring biological age is to capture this decline in a single metric, evaluated scientifically and expressed in years. The results tell us something we intuitively know: some people age better than others.