An Epigenetic Clock Analysis of Race/Ethnicity, Sex, and Coronary Heart Disease

Authors

Steve Horvath, University of California, Los Angeles
Michael Gurven, University of California, Santa Barbara
Morgan E. Levine, University of California, Los Angeles
Benjamin C. Trumble, University of California, Santa Barbara
Hillard Kaplan, Chapman UniversityFollow
Hooman Allayee, University of Southern California
Beate R. Ritz, University of California, Los Angeles
Brian Chen, National Institute on Aging
Ake T. Lu, University of California, Los Angeles
Tammy M. Rickabaugh, University of California, Los Angeles
Beth D. Jamieson, University of California, Los Angeles
Dianjianyi Sun, Tulane University
Shengxu Li, Tulane University
Wei Chen, Tulane University
Lluis Quintana-Murci, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Maud Fagny, Harvard School of Public Health
Michael S. Kobor, University of British Columbia
Philip S. Tsao, Stanford University
Alexander P. Reiner, University of Washington
Kerstin L. Edlefsen, University of Washington
Devin Absher, HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology
Themistocles L. Assimes, Stanford University

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

8-11-2016

Abstract

Background: 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.

Results: 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.

Conclusions: 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.

Comments

This article was originally published in Genome Biology, volume 17, issue 1, in 2016. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13059-016-1030-0

Recommended Citation

Horvath, S., Gurven, M., Levine, M. E., et al. (2016). An epigenetic clock analysis of race/ethnicity, sex, and coronary heart disease. Genome Biology, 17(1), 171. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13059-016-1030-0

Peer Reviewed

1

Copyright

The authors

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.