It’s official and it’s peer-reviewed in the “Aging” journal. Lean but in-depth design is what makes epiAge the best choice for long-term longevity monitoring. Why? The results epiAge offers are not only robust and reliable, they are also responsive and eminently replicable – all this at an unbeatable price!
Indeed, the results we witness with our proprietary 13 CpG*-test, are now being showcased by a scientific study featuring an experimental “ultra-bare bones” clock with 3 CpGs from the house of epiAge.
Why so lean? Well, you know it from the world of spices: when your senses are assaulted by a cacophony of aromas, it’s hard to discern the tenor of the sauce.
So, less is often more.
When it comes to epigenetic clocks, however, this creed has enjoyed limited acceptance.
Based on Steve Horvaths original biological clock, which enlisted 353 CpGs, most biological clocks still bet on the analysis of hundreds or even thousands of CpGs as well as on the chip array methodology. Unfortunately, this leads to a variety of serious technical and statistical issues that require subsequent readjustments and often lead to difficulties with replication.
So, the challenge set with EpiAgePublic was twofold. Researchers first sought to drastically reduce the number of CpGs to 3, all of them located along the ELOVL2 gene – a gene that robustly correlates with biological ageing. They also chose to enrol Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) instead of chip arrays since it remedies many of the latter’s challenges while enabling in depth-analysis.
This enabled EpiAgePublic to impressively compete with Horvath’s DNAmAge, Hannum’s DNAmAgeHannum, DNAmPhenoAge, DNAmAgeSkinBloodClock, and DNA GrimAge (versions 1 and 2) in a number of case studies, achieving comparable predictive accuracy with significantly fewer sites. In fact, EpiAgePublic, occasionally outperformed some of these clocks in its sensitivity to variations of epigenetic age acceleration.
However, bare-bones EpiAgePublic will probably not replace all existing clocks since they provide more comprehensive epigenetic signatures of ageing for specific clinical purposes.
But our epiAge with its 13 CpGs strikes a perfect balance between leanness and comprehensive coverage – making it eminently affordable to monitor longevity in both clinical and consumer settings. Indeed, it masterfully proves that a more streamlined and cost-effective approach to biological age determination need not sacrifice accuracy or responsiveness!
Plunge into the exciting findings here:
David Cheishvili, Sonia Do Carmo, Filippo Caraci, Margherita Grasso, Claudio Cuello, Moshe Szyf, “EpiAge: A next-generation sequencing-based ELOVL2 epigenetic clock for biological age assessment in saliva and blood across health and disease”. Aging (Albany NY), forthcoming. doi:10.18632/aging.206188. Available online: https://www.aging-us.com/article/206188/text
*areas in the genome that control gene expression
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