Ten drops of blood, one honest number: a score that shows how well you are ageing

Your birthday says how long you have lived; it says little about how well. Researchers led by Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands have built a blood score — Personal-MetaboHealth — from ten measurements in a single blood sample, drawn from research on some 44,000 volunteers. In a long-running Leiden study of 2,404 people, a higher score was linked to heart, vessel and metabolic diseases arriving much later — each extra point associated with the first such illness appearing about 13.7 years later on average. Just as usefully, the score moved when people ate better and moved more for three months, especially those who started unhealthiest — a number that can answer back when you change your life.

SDG 3 · Good health and well-being — Mechanism: tech innovation