Harvard researchers developed an AI to determine how medical treatments affect life spans
The system has already been tested on mice
Testing interventions
The researchers then tracked the frailty of two groups of mice given life-extending treatment or diets. The team claims the AI accurately predicted whether the interventions improved their future health or life expectancy.
The system also found that certain measures of frailty had a stronger link to future health. For example, hearing loss and body tremors were more closely connected to biological age than vision and whisker loss. In the future, the researchers want to give these factors more weight in their calculations.
The team admits the AI can’t yet be used to predict human health, which is influenced by a far more complex range of factors than those that affect mice. Frailty indices already exist for people, but the researchers haven’t found a suitable dataset tracking people from their 60s to their 90s with significant mortality follow-up data.
Nonetheless, they hope to one day develop a system that can more quickly and accurately predict human health spans and the effectiveness of life-extending interventions.
“Diseases like cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, neurodegeneration, and even severe COVID-19 predominantly affect older people,” said Kane. “We want to understand how the aging process itself works so we can find ways to reduce the incidence of all these diseases together, rather than one at a time.”
Researchers who wanna check how long their own mice have left to live cantry the tools outfor themselves. You can also read the research paper inNature Communications.
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Story byThomas Macaulay
Thomas is a senior reporter at TNW. He covers European tech, with a focus on AI, cybersecurity, and government policy.Thomas is a senior reporter at TNW. He covers European tech, with a focus on AI, cybersecurity, and government policy.
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