United States: One new CheekAge test, accepted in simple swiping inside mouth to gather the cells, could one day estimate how many years have a human left, according to developers.
The test tracks what are known as epigenetics: The influence that the context of an individual ‘brought genes to perform throughout life cycle.
As reported by HealthDay, a critical sign of epigenetics is DNA methylation that involve chemical modifications in DNA substrate which may shift the rate of a certain gene without modifying its building blocks.
The new CheekAge is a type of “epigenetic clock” – it measures certain epigenetic DNA methylation markers in cells collected from the inside of the cheek by rubbing a swab against the tissue.
Some of these patterns of methylation are said to correlate with normal life span by researchers at Tally Health, the New York based company that is formulating the test.
“Certain methylation sites are more critical for this relationship and can point at particular genes involved in certain processes and the human.FirstOrDefault author of the study, Dr Maxim Shokhirev, is the head of computational biology and data science, Tally Health.
His team released its paper Oct 1 in frontiers in Aging. The present study was supported by Tally Health and Welcome Trust.
New results were obtained using information received from the participants of the Lothian Birth Cohorts (LBC) at the University of Edinburgh. It has been following the lifestyles, the genes and the health of more than 1,500 Scottish people born between 1921 and 1936.
The participants have been taking DNA methylation test on blood cell every three years. More than 450,000 different methylation sites on their genome were examined.
Epigenetics outcomes of those blood cells were further compared with outcomes from CheekAge tests.
CheekAge is found to have a significant correspondence with mortality in a longitudinal dataset and was able to perform better compared to the first-generation clocks trained in datasets with blood data.”
More specifically, for the every increase by a almost a single standard deviation in the Cheek Age,” the odds for the death from any cause rose by 21% the researchers said in the journal news release.
Right now, blood based epigenetic testing is the gold standard but of course a simple cheek swab would be easier on the patients than a blood draw and if we see things based on the recent study results from the cheek Age appear to mirror those of the blood tests , Shokhirev said.
The fact that our epigenetic clock trained on the cheek cells predicts mortality when the measuring the methylome in the blood cells suggests there are more common mortality signals across the tissues,” he said.