What are the best practices for handling date calculations, such as determining age, in PHP applications to avoid normalization issues?

When handling date calculations in PHP applications to determine age, it's important to use the appropriate functions and methods to avoid normalization issues. One common mistake is using simple arithmetic operations on dates, which can lead to incorrect results due to leap years and varying lengths of months. To accurately calculate age, it's recommended to use PHP's DateTime objects and methods like diff() to calculate the difference between two dates.

$birthdate = new DateTime('1990-05-15');
$currentDate = new DateTime();
$age = $birthdate->diff($currentDate)->y;

echo "Age: " . $age;