AnthropoAge, a novel approach to integrate body composition into the estimation of biological age
Methods to estimate biological age (BA) capture different aspects of aging. Here, we consider the role of changes in body composition related to aging as a starting point to incorporate anthropometry into the estimation of BA. To that end, we developed AnthropoAge, a metric to estimate 10-year mortality risk as a proxy of BA using anthropometric and linked mortality data from NHANES-III (n=11,865) and validated it in NHANES-IV (n=7,065). We identified that thigh circumference, arm circumference, body-mass index (BMI), waist-to-height ratio (WHtR) and arm length were useful to predict BA in men, whilst weight, thigh circumference, subscapular and tricipital skinfolds and WHtR in women. We also developed a simplified version of AnthropoAge (S-AnthropoAge) which used only BMI and WHtR, with strong concordance with the complete metric. Both AnthropoAge and S-AnthropoAge were useful to predict 10-year mortality independent of ethnicity, sex, and comorbidities. In comparison to PhenoAge, AnthropoAge/S-AnthropoAge were superior for prediction of cardiovascular, cerebrovascular, cancer-related and nephritis/nephrosis related mortality risk in contrast with other causes. Accelerated aging metrics AnthropoAgeAccel/S-AnthropoAgeAccel identified males with phenotypes of decreased lean and fat mass and females with phenotypes of increased fat mass and increased abdominal adiposity, which likely reflected sexual dimorphisms related to accelerated body composition aging. When jointly assessing PhenoAge and AnthropoAge/S-AnthropoAge, we identified unique aging trajectories with differential mortality risk and comorbidity clustering. AnthropoAge is a useful proxy of BA, which captures cause-specific mortality risk; assessing aging using different BA measures may be useful to better characterize the heterogeneity of the aging process.