Longevity & AgingNMR Metabolomic Clocks Detect Accelerated Aging in Cancer and Liver Disease
Researchers at CIC bioGUNE developed an NMR-based metabolomic aging clock trained on ~20,000 individuals from the Basque Country AKRIBEA cohort. Using 1D ¹H-NMR NOESY spectra and ensemble stacking machine learning, the model achieves a Pearson correlation of 0.92 between metabolic and chronological age, with over 75% of individuals predicted within 10 years. A more interpretable metabolite-based version reaches R=0.88. Applied to disease cohorts, the clock detected significant metabolic age acceleration in prostate cancer (+4.9 years) and MASLD (+14.5 years), with MASLD subtypes showing distinct distortion profiles. The review also contextualizes this work within the broader landscape of epigenetic, transcriptomic, proteomic, and metabolomic aging clocks, highlighting NMR's advantages in throughput, reproducibility, and clinical interpretability for biological age assessment.
