Aging is about far more than wrinkles and gray hair, despite what social media and advertisements might have us believe. The real concern lies beneath the surface, where the biology of aging is intertwined with a host of diseases, from heart disease to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s to metabolic disorders and cancer. Targeting the processes that make the body age could have effects far beyond any single disease, potentially easing the burden of several age-related conditions at once.

A recent Frontiers in Aging study examines how different treatments that extend lifespan change the collection of small molecules and chemical signals in cells that dictate the body’s metabolism. The researchers started with five approaches that had already shown lifespan-extending effects in mice, introducing them when the male animals were 4 months old. The treatments included four drugs—rapamycin, acarbose, 17α-estradiol and canagliflozin—and caloric restriction.

At 12 months of age, the researchers analyzed the mice’s metabolites using a machine-learning method called XGBoost. They found that mice receiving lifespan-extending treatments had a different metabolic fingerprint from untreated mice, and this difference emerged well before their survival began to diverge.