Immune Cell Telomere Length Correlates with a Blended DNA Methylation and Immune System Biomarker of Aging

Epigenetic clocks based on the measurement of changing patterns of DNA methylation are perhaps the most promising approach to the production of a biomarker of aging - a way to quickly assess an individual's biological age, allowing assessment of the effectiveness of potential rejuvenation therapies in a rapid, low-cost manner. They are certainly far more accurate and useful on an individual basis than is the case for telomere length measured in the immune cells called leukocytes taken from a blood sample. The latter metric is really only reliable over large populations of individuals, and even then there are studies that find a poor or absent correlation with health outcomes. That these two measures should correlate with one another is to be expected, but in practice that isn't the case; I'd tend to blame that on the poor quality of telomere length as a metric. Here, researchers manage to generate a correlation by using a measure that mixes DNA methylation with immune system values known to change with aging, but I think that on balance all this says is that certain aspects of immune aging are related to one another. Aging eludes precise definition at the systemic level and denotes a multitude of processes at the cellular level. Two of these processes ─ age-dependent telomere shortening and DNA methylation (DNAm) profiles of cytosine phosphate guanines (CpGs) have been used as indices of biological age. The age estimates resulting from multivariable regression mode...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs