We don't all age at the same rate. But while some supercentenarians may age exceptionally slowly due to winning the genetics jackpot, a plethora of behavioral and lifestyle factors are known to speed up aging, including stress, poor sleep, poor nutrition, smoking, and alcohol. Since such environmental effects get imprinted on our genome in the form of epigenetic marks, it is possible to quantify molecular aging by characterizing the epigenome at prognostic genomic sites.
Over the past decade, scientists have developed several such 'epigenetic clocks', calibrated against chronological age and various lifestyle factors across large numbers of people. Most of these focused on DNA methylation in blood cells, which makes collection of samples onerous, as well as stressful for the patient. But earlier this year, scientists from the US developed a second-generation clock, called CheekAge, which is based on methylation data in easy-to-collect cells from inside the cheeks.
Now, in Frontiers in Aging , the team has shown for the first time that CheekAge can accurately predict the risk of mortality – and even if epigenetic data from another tissue is used as input. We also demonstrate that specific methylation sites are especially important for this correlation, revealing potential links between specific genes and processes and human mortality captured by our clock." Dr.
Maxim Shokhirev, study's first author and Head of Computational Biology and Data Science at Tally Health, New York .