Epigenetic clock as a correlate of anxiety
Bibliographic record
Abstract
DNA methylation changes consistently throughout life and age-dependent alterations in DNA methylation can be used to estimate one’s epigenetic age. Post-mortem studies revealed higher epigenetic age in brains of patients with major depressive disorder, as compared with controls. Since MDD is highly correlated with anxiety, we hypothesized that symptoms of anxiety, as well as lower volume of grey matter (GM) in depression-related cortical regions, will be associated with faster epigenetic clock in a community-based sample of young adults. Participants included 88 young adults (53% men; 23–24 years of age) from the European Longitudinal Study of Pregnancy and Childhood (ELSPAC) who participated in its neuroimaging follow-up and provided saliva samples for epigenetic analysis. Epigenetic age was calculated according to Horvath (Horvath, 2013). Women had slower epigenetic clock than men (Cohen’s d = 0.48). In women (but not men), slower epigenetic clock was associated with less symptoms of anxiety. In the brain, women (but not men) with slower epigenetic clock had greater GM volume in the cerebral cortex (brain size-corrected; R2 = 0.07). Lobe-specific analyses showed that in women (but not men), slower epigenetic clock was associated with greater GM volume in frontal lobe (R2 = 0.16), and that GM volume in frontal lobe mediated the relationship between the speed of epigenetic clock and anxiety trait (ab = 0.15, SE = 0.15, 95% CI [0.007; 0.369]). These findings were not replicated, however, in a community-based sample of adolescents (n = 129; 49% men; 12–19 years of age), possibly due to the different method of tissue collection (blood vs. saliva) or additional sources of variability in the cohort of adolescents (puberty stages, socioeconomic status, prenatal exposure to maternal smoking during pregnancy).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".