Research Paper|Volume 14, Issue 3|pp 1128—1156

Work-related stress and well-being in association with epigenetic age acceleration: A Northern Finland Birth Cohort 1966 Study

Anna Freni-Sterrantino¹, Giovanni Fiorito^1,², Angelo D’Errico³, Oliver Robinson¹, Marianna Virtanen^4,⁵, Leena Ala-Mursula⁶, Marjo-Riitta Järvelin^1,⁶, Justiina Ronkainen⁶, Paolo Vineis^1,^7,⁸

¹MRC Centre for Environment and Health, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Imperial College London, St Mary's Campus, London W2 1PG, United Kingdom
²Laboratory of Biostatistics, Department of Biomedical Sciences, University of Sassari, Sassari 07100, Italy
³Department of Epidemiology, Local Health Unit TO 3, Turin 10095, Italy
⁴School of Educational Sciences and Psychology, University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu FI-80101, Finland
⁵Division of Insurance Medicine, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm 17177, Sweden
⁶Center for Life Course Health Research, Faculty of Medicine, University of Oulu, Oulu 90014, Finland
⁷Grantham Institute for Climate Change and School of Public Health, Imperial College London, London SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom
⁸IIGM – Italian Institute for Genomic Medicine (IIGM), IRCCS Candiolo, Torino 10060, Italy

Received: September 4, 2021Accepted: January 25, 2022Published: February 2, 2022

https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.203872

Copyright: © 2022 Freni-Sterrantino et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Recent evidence indicates consistent association of low socioeconomic status with epigenetic age acceleration, measured from DNA methylation. As work characteristics and job stressors are crucial components of socioeconomic status, we investigated their association with various measures of epigenetic age acceleration.

The study population included employed and unemployed men and women (n=604) from the Northern Finland Birth Cohort 1966. We investigated the association of job strain, effort-reward imbalance and work characteristics with five biomarkers of epigenetic aging (Hannum, Horvath, PhenoAge, GrimAge, and DunedinPoAm).

Our results indicate few significant associations between work stress indicators and epigenetic age acceleration, limited to a range of ±2 years, and smoking recording the highest effect on GrimAge age acceleration biomarker between current and no smokers (median difference 4.73 years (IQR 1.18, 8.41). PhenoAgeAA was associated with job strain active work (β=-1.301 95%CI -2.391, -0.212), slowing aging of less than 1.5 years, and working as white-collar slowed aging six months (GrimAgeAA β=-0.683, 95%CI -1.264, -0.102) when compared to blue collars. Association was found for working for more than 40 hours per week that increased the aging over 1.5 years, (HorvathAA β =2.058 95%CI 0.517,3.599, HannumAA β=1.567, 95%CI 0.415,2.719).

The pattern of associations was different between women and men and some of the estimated effects are inconsistent with current literature. Our results provide the first evidence of association of work conditions with epigenetic aging biomarkers. However, further epidemiological research is needed to fully understand how work-related stress affects epigenetic age acceleration in men and women in different societies.