Few Evident Relationships Between Accelerated Epigenetic Aging and Cancer

Epigenetic clocks are produced by identifying characteristic shifts in epigenetic marks with age, the decorations on the genome that control gene expression. It remains unclear as to the exact relationship between specific epigenetic marks and the underlying damage and dysfunction of aging, and so it remains unknown as to how comprehensively epigenetic clocks reflect the processes of aging: do all of the processes of aging contribute, or only some of them? If the latter, it will be hard to use epigenetic clocks to assess the quality of potential rejuvenation therapies. Removing that uncertainty will require a great deal of further work. When epigenetic age is higher than chronological age, this is referred to as accelerated epigenetic age. It is thought to reflect a greater burden of the underlying cell and tissue damage that causes aging, but of course the uncertainty remains as to whether this is a full versus selective representation of the state of health for any given epigenetic clock - any given combination of epigenetic marks, in other words. Are there aspects of aging that contribute little to epigenetic age? With that in mind, researchers here note that a first pass at analysis of cancer incidence and accelerated epigenetic age found little in the way of firm correlations. This is interesting, as (a) cancer risk is very robustly age-associated, (b) the risk of a number of other age-related conditions does correlate to accelerated epigenetic age, and (c)...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs