The Longevity Dashboard: Which Health Measures Are Useful, and Which Are Still Experimental?

Two ways to ask how well you are aging. One is an inflatable cuff that has been around for more than a century and is sold in ordinary pharmacies. The other is a mail-in kit that reads chemical tags on your DNA and returns a “biological age”, sometimes years younger or older than the one on your passport. The second sounds far more like the future. For almost everyone, the first is far more useful today.

That contrast is the whole problem with the longevity dashboard, the growing set of numbers people track in the hope of living longer and better. Some of those numbers are backed by decades of evidence and clear actions. Others are fascinating research tools whose meaning for an individual is not yet settled. This field guide sorts them. It is general information, not medical advice: what to measure, and what to do about it, is a conversation for you and a clinician.

What makes a health measure useful?

Before sorting the dashboard, it helps to agree on what “useful” means. A good measure for an individual usually has four qualities:

• It predicts something that matters, such as heart attack, stroke, disability or death, and not just another lab number.
• It is reliable. Measure it twice under similar conditions and you get a similar answer.
• It can be changed, by behavior or treatment.
• Changing it helps. Lowering or raising the number has been shown to improve outcomes, not merely to move the number.

That last test is the hardest to pass, and it separates established measures from experimental ones. Regulators call a number that stands in for a real outcome a surrogate endpoint; our explainer inside a clinical trial shows why they need careful validation.

Tier one: the established core

The American Heart Association’s Life’s Essential 8, updated in 2022, is a useful anchor. It combines four behaviors (diet, physical activity, nicotine exposure and sleep) with four measurements (body mass index, non-HDL cholesterol, blood sugar and blood pressure). None is exotic. All have been studied for decades.

Blood pressure

If one number earns a permanent place on the dashboard, it is this one. The CDC notes that high blood pressure usually has no warning signs and that measuring it is the only way to know you have it. The CDC describes normal as below 120/80 mm Hg and high blood pressure as consistently at or above 130/80. It also meets the tough test above: the FDA accepts lowering blood pressure as a validated surrogate for reducing stroke risk, because trials showed that bringing it down prevents strokes.

Cholesterol, blood sugar and weight

Non-HDL cholesterol is total cholesterol minus the “good” HDL fraction, capturing the particles most linked to clogged arteries. Blood sugar is often assessed with an HbA1c test, which reflects average glucose over the previous few months. Body mass index (weight relative to height) is a blunt tool that cannot tell muscle from fat, but it remains a practical screening measure. Each is interpreted in context, alongside age, family history and other risks, which is why guidelines route them through a clinician.

The most valuable numbers on a longevity dashboard are often the least exciting ones, because we already know what to do when they go wrong.

Tier two: measures of function

A second group of measures tracks what your body can do rather than what is circulating in your blood. They are cheap, and their links to health outcomes are well documented, though mostly from observational studies, which follow people over time without assigning an intervention.

Grip strength

The PURE study, published in The Lancet in 2015, measured grip strength in nearly 140,000 adults across 17 countries of differing income levels. Weaker grip was associated with higher risk of death from any cause and from cardiovascular disease; each 5 kg lower grip strength was linked with roughly 16% higher risk of death. Grip was a stronger predictor of death than systolic blood pressure in that analysis.

The key word is associated. Grip strength is probably a window onto overall muscle health and frailty, not a lever in itself. Squeezing a hand gripper all day is not what the study tested.

Activity itself

Rather than a biomarker, the most actionable functional measure may be activity. The US Physical Activity Guidelines recommend 150 to 300 minutes a week of moderate-intensity aerobic activity for adults, plus muscle-strengthening activity on at least two days, and note that even short bouts count.

Tier three: consumer sensors, useful with caveats

Wearables that estimate heart rate, steps and sleep are now common. They can be good at showing trends for one person, such as whether you are moving more this month, even when their absolute accuracy varies by device and situation.

Continuous glucose monitors (CGMs), small sensors worn on the skin that estimate blood sugar every few minutes, have moved into this tier. In March 2024 the FDA cleared the first over-the-counter CGM, Dexcom’s Stelo, for adults who do not use insulin, including people without diabetes curious about how diet and exercise affect their glucose. The FDA was explicit that it is not for people who use insulin or have problematic low blood sugar, and that users should not make medical decisions from its readings without talking to a healthcare provider. Clearance means the device may be sold for that use; it is not evidence that tracking glucose makes healthy people live longer, a question that remains open.

Tier four: experimental “biological age” tests

Here is where the most striking numbers live, and where caution matters most.

Epigenetic clocks

Your DNA sequence stays largely fixed, but cells attach small chemical tags, called methyl groups, to it, which help switch genes on and off. The pattern of these tags shifts with age. In 2013 Steve Horvath published an epigenetic clock built from 353 such sites, trained on about 8,000 samples covering 51 tissues and cell types, that estimates age from methylation with notable accuracy. Later clocks were trained to predict health outcomes rather than birthdays.

One of these, DunedinPACE (2022), estimates the pace of aging from a blood sample. It was built from New Zealanders followed from age 26 to 45, whose decline across 19 markers of organ function was tracked. In other cohorts, faster DunedinPACE was linked to higher risk of disease, disability and death. Its authors are candid about limits: the development cohort was modest in size and mostly of white European ancestry, and before it could serve as a surrogate endpoint, researchers would need to show it responds to interventions and that such changes predict better health.

That is why a single consumer “biological age” result is best read as an interesting research-grade estimate, not a diagnosis. Different clocks can give different answers for the same person, and there is not yet good evidence that acting on one improves outcomes. Other candidate markers of aging are in a similar position. For the underlying biology, see our pieces on the cell health frontier and whether we can slow aging.

Reading your own dashboard

A few principles help, whatever you choose to track:

1. Start with the boring numbers. Blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar and activity carry the strongest evidence.
2. Watch trends, not single readings. One reading can be noise.
3. Ask what you would do differently. A test that cannot change a decision may add worry without benefit.
4. Be wary of scores sold with supplements. A company that measures your “age” and sells the fix has a conflict of interest.
5. Bring results to a clinician, especially anything outside a normal range.

New to terms like methylation or HbA1c? Our glossary explains them.