What if there was a single metric that could capture every aspect of your health — how strong you are, how clear your vision is, how sharply you think?

That’s the goal of intrinsic capacity, a holistic measure of what someone’s body and mind are capable of.

“It’s not really a sexy term,” but it makes sense from a scientific perspective, said Dr. John Beard, a professor of productive aging at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health who helped to develop the concept. “‘Intrinsic’ means all those attributes that you can attribute to the individual from the skin in,” he said. “And ‘capacity’ is looking at their functioning.”

You can’t ask your doctor to test your intrinsic capacity just yet, but experts hope that physicians will eventually use it with older patients to track their health and well-being — and potentially with younger patients, too. More immediately, longevity scientists think it may be the key to demonstrating whether a medication or lifestyle change aimed at slowing aging actually works.

How does the metric work?
Intrinsic capacity was formally defined in 2015 by the World Health Organization as part of its healthy aging initiative, which in part aims to move doctors and scientists away from focusing on disease and toward maximizing and maintaining older adults’ functional abilities.

Experts derive someone’s intrinsic capacity score from their performance on five “subdomains”: cognition, locomotion (strength and mobility), sensory capacity (vision and hearing), psychological well-being and vitality (overall energy levels and resilience to physical stressors). Many of the tests that assess these subdomains are already used to evaluate older adults’ health, such as grip strength and walking speed.

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