Traditional disease risk factors that are inexpensive and easy to measure, such as body mass index, waist-to-hip ratio, smoking and alcohol consumption, outperform biological age tests based on epigenetics as predictors of future disease.
Epigenetic clocks are designed to estimate a person's biological age. Instead of measuring chronological age, they aim to capture the biological changes that accumulate in the body over time.
Epigenetic clocks and other types of biological age tests are widely used in ageing research. In recent years, they have also been marketed directly to consumers as a means of assessing personal health.
However, a new study conducted at Tampere University demonstrates that simple, well-established risk factors are better at predicting the onset of chronic disease among middle-aged adults than epigenetic clocks. The study found that a statistical model based on body mass index, waist-to-hip ratio, smoking and alcohol consumption was a more accurate predictor of future disease than any of the epigenetic clocks analysed.
"Epigenetic tests are marketed to consumers with grandiose claims about helping people better understand their ageing process. These tests can cost hundreds of euros, and consumers are encouraged to repeat them, for example every six months, to monitor changes. People interested in their health and disease risk should carefully consider whether they might be better off with a set of scales, a measuring tape and an assessment of their lifestyle," says Senior Research Fellow Saara Marttila, who led the study.
"An epigenetic clock may identify a statistically significant risk of future disease, but that does not necessarily mean it is a better predictor of disease risk. What is important is to determine whether these tests provide additional information beyond what can already be learned from established risk factors. If tests are touted as transformative tools, the companies selling them should also be able to demonstrate that they provide this type of additional value," says the first author of the study, Doctoral Researcher Daria Kostiniuk. The new study is part of Kostiniuk's doctoral dissertation.
The researchers used data from the Cardiovascular Risk in Young Finns Study (LASERI) , a longitudinal study that has been running since 1980. The analysis included 1,108 participants aged 34 to 49 years when the study began, none of whom had been diagnosed with a chronic disease. They were followed for 7–9 years.
"It is invaluable to have access to such extensive, high-quality longitudinal research data to investigate my key research questions. It would be impossible for an individual researcher or a single research group to compile a comparable dataset independently," says Marttila.
The research article titled "Traditional Disease Risk Factors Outperform Epigenetic Clocks as Predictors of Non-Communicable Disease Morbidity in a Middle-Aged Cohort" was published in Aging Cell on 9 July 2026.
