An epigenetic clock analysis of race/ethnicity, sex, and coronary heart disease

By Steve Horvath, Michael Gurven, M. Levine, B. Trumble, Hillard S. Kaplan, H. Allayee, B. Ritz, Brian H. Chen, A. Lu, T. Rickabaugh and 12 more. Genome Biology, 2016

669 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Epigenetic biomarkers of aging (the “epigenetic clock”) have the potential to address puzzling findings surrounding mortality rates and incidence of cardio-metabolic disease such as: (1) women consistently exhibiting lower mortality than men despite having higher levels of morbidity; (2) racial/ethnic groups having different mortality rates even after adjusting for socioeconomic differences; (3) the black/white mortality cross-over effect in late adulthood; and (4) Hispanics in the United States having a longer life expectancy than Caucasians despite having a higher burden of traditional cardio-metabolic risk factors. We analyzed blood, saliva, and brain samples from seven different racial/ethnic groups. We assessed the intrinsic epigenetic age acceleration of blood (independent of blood cell counts) and the extrinsic epigenetic aging rates of blood (dependent on blood cell counts and tracks the age of the immune system). In blood, Hispanics and Tsimane Amerindians have lower intrinsic but higher extrinsic epigenetic aging rates than Caucasians. African-Americans have lower extrinsic epigenetic aging rates than Caucasians and Hispanics but no differences were found for the intrinsic measure. Men have higher epigenetic aging rates than women in blood, saliva, and brain tissue. Epigenetic aging rates are significantly associated with sex, race/ethnicity, and to a lesser extent with CHD risk factors, but not with incident CHD outcomes. These results may help elucidate lower than expected mortality rates observed in Hispanics, older African-Americans, and women.

Subfields: Genetics, Molecular Biology, Pediatrics, Perinatology and Child Health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a20056e3bfa556825ca440198bc85faa23d171bd

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Citations in the corpus

DNA methylation-based measures of biological age: meta-analysis predicting time to death (2016, methodology): “We used an epigenetic biomarker of age based on 353 CpG markers as one measure of epigenetic age because: a) it is an accurate measurement of age across multiple tissues [3]; b) we previously showed that it is predictive of all-cause mortality [5]; c) it correlated with measures of cognitive/physica”
Epigenetic clock analysis of diet, exercise, education, and lifestyle factors (2017, neutral): “Hispanics have lower levels of IEAA compared to other ethnic groups [59].”
An epigenetic biomarker of aging for lifespan and healthspan (2018, background): “We and others have shown that the estimated blood cell counts have moderately high correlations with corresponding flow cytometric measures [62, 63].”
Biological Age Predictors (2017, background): “…the cell-type adjustedHorvath clock is not associatedwith common disease risk factors such as alcohol use, smoking, diabetes, hypertension, and the levels of high- and low density lipoproteins, insulin, glucose, triglycerides, C-reactive protein (CRP) and creatinine (Horvath et al., 2016).”
DNA methylation aging clocks: challenges and recommendations (2019, background): “Cross-sectional studies have also consistently shown strong biological sex differences, with men having greater positive age acceleration than women [102].”