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Blood-based PhenoAge may reflect disease burden rather than biological aging in cancer

Simhal, A. K.; Lee, J.; Tan, K. S.; McCormick, P. J.; Fischer, G. W.; Scarpa, J. R.; Sapiro, G.; Mincer, J. S.

2026-10-19 oncology
10.64898/2026.10.15.26365671 medRxiv
Show abstract

PhenoAge, a blood-based biological aging clock, is associated with cancer outcomes, a finding taken as evidence that biological aging shapes prognosis. In 3,067 patients undergoing primary tumor resection, PhenoAge acceleration rose with tumor stage. One or two of its eight blood components, differing by cancer type, carried the prognostic signal, and replacing its general-population weights with equal weights did not weaken it. In cancer, PhenoAge may reflect disease burden rather than biological aging.

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"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.