Tally Health™ Publishes Groundbreaking Scientific Paper on Innovative Next-Generation Epigenetic Age Clock

Tally Health™, a revolutionary consumer longevity company founded to change the way we age, today announces the scientific demonstration of a novel next-generation aging clock, CheekAge. As part of its commitment to scientific integrity and overall transparency, Tally Health has committed to share its ground-breaking research for public review. Tally Health’s newly published paper in the leading scientific aging journal GeroScience shows how capturing lifestyle and health information as well as DNA methylation samples from a remarkable cohort of over 8,000 individuals enabled the company to develop a proprietary epigenetic aging clock for age prediction using buccal swabs.

Tally Health’s CheekAge clock is one of the only examples of a next-generation aging clock trained on such a large and diverse sample set that incorporates health and lifestyle factors and uses a non-invasive collection method, making age testing more accessible.

The body of work behind Tally Health’s CheekAge clock provides the scientific foundation for the company’s currently available TallyAgeTM Test. The paper establishes Tally Health’s ability to build an accurate and reproducible next-generation aging clock that relies on a non-invasive process for DNA collection. To create CheekAge, Tally Health leveraged state-of-the-art machine-learning methods developed by its in-house scientific research team to incorporate DNA methylation signals, as well as lifestyle and health factors from its data set, into model training. The CheekAge clock was built using a combination of cutting-edge methods including multi-objective optimization and model ensembling, which further improved accuracy and test-retest reliability.  Once trained, Tally Health validated and verified the accuracy of CheekAge on various publicly available datasets, including those from patients with cancer, COVID-19, and progeria, a genetic disease that causes accelerated aging.

Tally Health Chief Executive Officer Melanie Goldey underscored Tally’s commitment to transparency, stating: “Scientific integrity is a core value at Tally Health as we pursue our mission to help increase human healthspan and lifespan. Publishing our research for public review in peer-reviewed journals reinforces the credibility of the tools we offer;  consumers can trust Tally to show that longevity isn’t just a movement, it’s science.”

Until CheekAge, epigenetic aging clocks that employed non-invasive cheek swab collection still faced accuracy issues due to testing and sampling limitations (iScience). To address this, Tally Health collected DNA methylation from cheek swabs, as well as lifestyle, and health information, all from a landmark dataset of 8,045 diverse adults, evenly split by sex at birth, ranging in age from 18 to 100 years old, and with over 30% non-white participants. By working with such a vast and well-distributed data set, Tally Health’s science team was able to build a more accurate and representative next-generation aging clock optimized for prediction from cheek swabs.

“We’re proud to see our proprietary CheekAge clock receive validation from the scientific community with the publication of our research,” said Tally Health’s Head of Bioinformatics, Max Shokhirev, Ph.D. “At Tally Health, we believe everyone should be able to track their epigenetic age using a non-invasive test associated with lifestyle changes, which is why the work behind CheekAge is so important. We owe it to our customers to demonstrate the research and development that has gone into CheekAge which serves as the inspiration for our  TallyAgeTM Test, and receiving this recognition is a major step in that direction.”

In just over a year since its launch, Tally Health’s preventative health solution of repeat epigenetic age testing and personalized interventions to help reduce epigenetic age have produced dramatic results amongst the company’s subscriber base. Since the commercial launch of the company in February 2023, 62% of Tally Health members have been able to reduce their epigenetic age by an average of 2.34 years, while 75% of members have increased their lifestyle survey scores, a measure of how well they are doing across five key wellness areas – diet, fitness, sleep, mental health, and habits. As Tally Health looks to the future, the company seeks to apply its learnings from the development of CheekAge to help improve personalized lifestyle recommendations, explore how methylation changes over time as we age, and continue improving the TallyAgeTM Test, including increased accuracy, explainability, correlation with a wider variety of health and lifestyle factors, and test-retest reliability.

To become a Tally Health member, or purchase TallyAge™ Tests and Tally’s unique pro-longevity supplements, visit TallyHealth.com.