Review article on epigenetic clocks

[mccoy]

My interest on epigenetic clocks is still hot, I believe until I'll have grasped the basic rationale of them. This is an interesting review article, which cites among other things the Fahy experiment and the perplexities of Matt Kaeberlein on the clocks.

 

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00077-8

[mccoy]

The one emphasized below is the basic concept. The deviation of the clock from the true chronological age ought to be an indicator of ageing. Simply put, if the deviation (biological-chronological age) is positive, we are in the region of higher than average aging and vice-versa-. If the deviation is caused by an error, though, there is no reliable outcome of biological age.

 

Quote

 

Early clocks did this quite well when applied retrospectively to pre-existing data sets. But an intrinsic limitation of first-generation clocks was neatly illustrated in a 2019 study⁶ by researchers at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia: given enough training data, an algorithm programmed to detect age-dependent patterns could almost perfectly compute chronological age. But the better it did this, the worse it predicted mortality.

“We actually want deviation from chronological age,” says Morgan Levine, who studies ageing and epigenetics at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. “But we don’t want the deviation to be error. We want it to be biologically meaningful.” Clock scores should be higher in people who are ageing faster, and lower in those declining slowly.

 

 

[mccoy]

At the end of the article, there is an unexpected and very interesting chunk of information regarding the TRIIM-X trial (or intervene-immune phase II): Steve Horvath enrolled as a participant!!

Quote

In the meantime, Intervene Immune’s phase II replication of their mixture of growth hormone and diabetes medication carries on. Such is Horvath’s interest in the trial he even enrolled as a participant. “I will withhold any judgement until 12 months from now,” he says. “I will analyse the data, and if it didn’t replicate, I will tell this to the world. But I hope it will replicate because wouldn’t it be nice?”