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Epigenetic influences on aging: a longitudinal genome-wide methylation study in old Swedish twins

Wang, Y; Karlsson, R; Lampa, E; Zhang, Q; Hedman, ÅK; Almgren, M; Almqvist, C; ... Hägg, S; + view all (2018) Epigenetic influences on aging: a longitudinal genome-wide methylation study in old Swedish twins. Epigenetics 10.1080/15592294.2018.1526028. Green open access

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Abstract

Age-related changes in DNA methylation were observed in cross-sectional studies, but longitudinal evidence is still limited. Here, we aimed to characterize longitudinal age-related methylation patterns (Illumina HumanMethylation450) using 1011 blood samples collected from 385 Swedish twins (age at entry: mean 69 and standard deviation 9.7, 73 monozygotic and 96 dizygotic pairs) up to five times (mean 2.6) over 20 years (mean 8.7). We identified 1316 age-associated methylation sites (P<1.3×10-7) using a longitudinal epigenome-wide association study design. We measured how estimated cellular compositions changed with age and how much they confounded the age effect. We validated the results in two independent longitudinal cohorts, where 118 CpGs were replicated in Prospective Investigation of the Vasculature in Uppsala Seniors (PIVUS, 390 samples) (P<3.9×10-5), 594 in Lothian Birth Cohort (LBC, 3018 samples) (P<5.1×10-5) and 63 in both. Functional annotation of age-associated CpGs showed enrichment in CCCTC-binding factor (CTCF) and other transcription factor binding sites. We further investigated genetic influences on methylation and found no interaction between age and genetic effects in the 1316 age-associated CpGs. Moreover, in the same CpGs, methylation differences within twin pairs increased with 6.4% over 10 years, where monozygotic twins had smaller intra-pair differences than dizygotic twins. In conclusion, we show that age-related methylation changes persist in a longitudinal perspective, and are fairly stable across cohorts. The changes are under genetic influence, although this effect is independent of age. Moreover, methylation variability increase over time, especially in age-associated CpGs, indicating the increase of environmental contributions on DNA methylation with age.

Type: Article
Title: Epigenetic influences on aging: a longitudinal genome-wide methylation study in old Swedish twins
Location: United States
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1080/15592294.2018.1526028
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1080/15592294.2018.1526028
Language: English
Additional information: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Keywords: DNA methylation, aging, longitudinal study, meQTL, twin-pair analysis
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Medical Sciences > Cancer Institute
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Medical Sciences > Cancer Institute > Research Department of Cancer Bio
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10058086
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