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National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 43(111), p. 15538-15543, 2014

DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1412759111

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Obesity accelerates epigenetic aging of human liver

Journal article published in 2014 by Steve Horvath, Wiebke Erhart, Mario Brosch, Ole Ammerpohl, Witigo von Schonfels, Markus Ahrens, Nils Heits, Jordana T. Bell, Pei-Chien Tsai, Tim D. Spector, Panos Deloukas ORCID, Reiner Siebert, Thomas Becker, Bence Sipos, Christoph Rocken and other authors.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Abstract

Significance Because obese people are at an increased risk of many age-related diseases, it is a plausible hypothesis that obesity increases the biological age of some tissues and cell types. However, it has been difficult to detect such an accelerated aging effect because it is unclear how to measure tissue age. Here we use a recently developed biomarker of aging (known as “epigenetic clock”) to study the relationship between epigenetic age and obesity in several human tissues. We report an unexpectedly strong correlation between high body mass index and the epigenetic age of liver tissue. This finding may explain why obese people suffer from the early onset of many age-related pathologies, including liver cancer.