Sex-specific aging clocks put men and women on different timetables

Researchers at the Beijing Institute of Genomics, Xuanwu Hospital of Capital Medical University, Nanchang University and Sichuan University published aging clocks on 25 August 2026 built from measurements that hospitals already take.

The cohort covers more than 100,000 adults aged 18 to 98 at three centres in China, in Beijing, Nanchang and Quzhou, and the models use 172 routine clinical indicators rather than a specialist assay. Building the clocks separately for each sex is the point: the paper reports aging trajectories that diverge between women and men during midlife and then converge again in later life. Metabolic markers, including low-density lipoprotein, triglycerides, glucose and uric acid, together with tumour markers, come out as the drivers that accumulate with age.

Medical Xpress reports the transitions as falling between 35 and 45 in men, dominated by body mass index, triglycerides and cholesterol, and between 55 and 65 in women, around menopause, dominated by endocrine and lipid measures.

The practical significance is the input list. An aging clock built on methylation arrays needs a research budget; one built on a standard blood panel and a chart could in principle run on records that already exist. The cohort is single-country, which is the obvious constraint on reading these ages as universal.