Blood Test-Based age Acceleration Is Inversely Associated with High-Volume Sports Activity

We develop blood test-based aging clocks and examine how these clocks reflect high-volume sports activity. We use blood tests and body metrics data of 421 Hungarian athletes and 283 age-matched controls (mean age 24.1 and 23.9 years, respectively), the latter selected from a group of healthy Caucasians of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) to represent the general population (n = 11,412). We train two age prediction models (i.e., aging clocks) using the NHANES dataset: the first model relies on blood test parameters only, while the second one additionally incorporates body measurements and sex. We find lower age acceleration among athletes compared to the age-matched controls with a median value of -1.7 and 1.4 years, p