How does BrainYears™ compare to blood-based biological age tests?

Blood-based biological age tests — including DNA methylation clocks (such as the Horvath and Hannum clocks), proteomic-based clocks, and glycan-based tests — estimate biological age from systemic biomarkers in the blood. These are well-validated tools for predicting age-related disease risk and all-cause mortality.

Some of these approaches, including recently published plasma proteomic clocks, now provide organ-specific age estimates including a brain age estimate derived from blood. These are indirect, molecular-level inferences — the brain age number is computed from protein signatures or methylation patterns in the blood that statistically correlate with brain aging in reference datasets.

BrainYears™ measures the brain directly, under controlled conditions, capturing the electrical signals that reflect how the brain is actually performing — not inferring brain state from peripheral markers.