CausAge (causality-aware clock)
DECausAge (kausalitätsbewusste Altersuhr)
CausAge is an epigenetic clock built to fix a deep flaw in the clocks that estimate your biological age. It was introduced by Ying, Gladyshev and colleagues (preprint 2022; Nature Aging 2024). The problem it tackles: standard clocks pick out methylation sites (CpGs) that simply correlate with age, without knowing whether each change causes aging, results from it, or just rides along. CausAge uses causal inference (informed by Mendelian randomization) to find CpGs whose change is more likely to be a cause of aging, not just a symptom. It also splits out two sub-clocks: DamAge, for damage-linked accelerated aging, and AdaptAge, for protective adaptive responses. The takeaway is that clock CpGs are not all alike. The death-linked acceleration seems to be driven mainly by the damage sites, not the adaptive ones.
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