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Nature medicine

September 16, 2026 · via Europe PMC

Sex-specific biological aging clocks across organs and omics.

MULTI Consortium, Song Z, Feng D, +16 more, Wen J.

Journal ArticleAbstract only — full text under license

AI summary — for doctors, generated from the abstract only

Sex-specific biological aging clocks across 15 organ systems diverged between females and males and predicted disease and mortality in sex- and organ-dependent ways.

What was studied

Development of 38 sex-specific aging clocks using multi-omics data with genetic, proteomic, and survival analyses.

Key findings

  • Marked divergence between female and male clocks
  • Organ-specific aging relates differently to cardiometabolic, endocrine, mental traits by sex
  • Sex-specific clocks predicted systemic disease and mortality
  • Brain clock associated with cognitive decline sex-dependently in a preclinical AD trial

Clinical relevance

This research supports sex-stratified biomarker development; no immediate clinical application.

Who should care

General Medicine

Limitations

Computational; clinical utility not established.

Biological aging differs by sex, so aging clocks should too.

This is an AI-generated summary of the published abstract, not a clinical recommendation. It may not reflect the full text or subsequent updates — verify against the original source before acting on it.

Abstract

Sex differentially shapes aging, neurodevelopment and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease (AD). However, most biological aging clocks (artificial intelligence-predicted age minus chronological age) were trained on sex-pooled samples and implicitly assume sex invariance.Here we developed 38 sex-specific biological aging clocks across 15 organ systems. We first demonstrate the importance of sex-stratified training for constructing sex-specific healthy normative references and then reveal marked divergence between female and male clocks. Key genetic parameters and Mendelian randomization results indicate that organ-specific aging liability and its relationships to cardiometabolic, endocrine and mental traits are configured differently in females and males. Proteomic analyses identify distinct, organ-resolved synaptic, immune, vascular and metabolic networks that differentially track female and male biological aging. In longitudinal survival analyses, sex-specific clocks predict whole-body systemic diseases and all-cause mortality in a sex-dependent and organ-dependent manner. Further analyses reveal sex-dependent associations between the brain aging clock and cognitive decline trajectory during a preclinical AD clinical trial. Sex-stratified clocks may offer distinct value by defining biological age against sex-appropriate normative references and revealing sex-dependent genetic, molecular and clinical signatures that pooled models may obscure. Meanwhile, sex-pooled and sex-interaction approaches remain valuable, as human aging and disease also share fundamental biological similarities between females and males. Together, these findings reveal sex-specific biological aging signatures in aging, AD and systemic health, highlighting the need for explicitly sex-stratified modeling approaches.

DOI

10.1038/s41591-026-04662-6

PMID

42749890

Research metadata (titles, abstracts, authors, publication dates) is sourced from Europe PMC, which aggregates content from PubMed/MEDLINE, PubMed Central, and other providers under the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM/NCBI). NLM does not claim copyright on abstracts; the original journal publishers or authors may hold rights to the full articles. AI-generated summaries are derived only from the abstract, never the full text, and are always labeled as AI-generated.

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