Please join the Princeton Precision Health (PPH) Initiative for a seminar on Friday, September 13, at 12:00 pm, at 252 Nassau Street:

Guillermo Sapiro, PhD, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Princeton University

 

A Wearable-Based Biomarker of Aging and Its Association With Disease and Behavior

 

Biomarkers of aging play a vital role in understanding human longevity and have the potential to inform clinical decisions and new interventions.  Existing measures of biological age are typically based on blood, saliva, vital signs, or clinical imaging. Wearables, however, can make convenient, frequent, and inexpensive measurements throughout daily life, scaled to an entire population. We propose PPGAge, a biomarker that is non-invasively, passively, and longitudinally measurable by photoplethysmography (PPG) collected from a consumer wearable. With data from the Apple Heart & Movement Study (n=213,593 participants and over 149 million participant-days), we develop a statistical model of healthy aging and study its association with disease and behavior. PPGAge predicts chronological age with mean absolute error (MAE) of 2.43 years (95% CI 2.33--2.53) in a healthy cohort and 3.18 years (95% CI 3.16--3.19) in a general cohort. Among participants with a PPGAge gap (i.e., the deviation between predicted age and chronological age) larger than 6 years, diagnosis rates of heart disease, heart failure, and diabetes are 1.5--5 times the age- and sex-adjusted average. PPGAge is also associated with behavior, including smoking, exercise, and sleep. In longitudinal analyses, PPGAge exhibits a sharp increase during pregnancy and around the time of certain types of cardiac events. With additional evidence, PPGAge may be a useful surrogate for healthy aging in the study of human longevity and the treatment of age-related conditions. Joint work with A. Miller, J. Futoma, S.  Abbaspourazad, C. Heinze-Deml, S. Emrani, and I. Shapiro.

 

Lunch will be provided. Please note that getting to the seminar space currently requires that you climb a set of stairs. If an accommodation is needed, please contact PPH in advance at: princetonPPH@princeton.edu