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Research Paper|Volume 14, Issue 19|pp 7752—7773

Association between work characteristics and epigenetic age acceleration: cross-sectional results from UK – Understanding Society study

Anna Freni-Sterrantino1,2, Giovanni Fiorito1,3, Angelo d’Errico4, Marianna Virtanen5,6, Leena Ala-Mursula7, Marjo-Riitta Järvelin1,7, Paolo Vineis1, Oliver Robinson1,8
  • 1MRC Centre for Environment and Health, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Public Health, Imperial College London, London W2 1PG, United Kingdom
  • 2The Alan Turing Institute, John Dodson House, London NW1 2DB, United Kingdom
  • 3Laboratory of Biostatistics, Department of Biomedical Sciences, University of Sassari, Sassari 07100, Italy
  • 4Department of Epidemiology, Local Health Unit TO 3, Turin 10095, Italy
  • 5School of Educational Sciences and Psychology, University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu FI-80101, Finland
  • 6Division of Insurance Medicine, Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm 17177, Sweden
  • 7Center for Life Course Health Research, Faculty of Medicine, University of Oulu, Oulu 90014, Finland
  • 8Ageing Epidemiology (AGE) Research Unit, School of Public Health, Imperial College of London, London W2 1PG, United Kingdom
Received: May 20, 2022Accepted: September 17, 2022Published: October 5, 2022
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.204327

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

Occupation-related stress and work characteristics are possible determinants of social inequalities in epigenetic aging but have been little investigated. Here, we investigate the association of several work characteristics with epigenetic age acceleration (AA) biomarkers.

The study population included employed and unemployed men and women (n = 631) from the UK Understanding Society study. We evaluated the association of employment and work characteristics related to job type, job stability; job schedule; autonomy and influence at work; occupational physical activity; and feelings regarding the job with four epigenetic age acceleration biomarkers (Hannum, Horvath, PhenoAge, GrimAge) and pace of aging (DunedinPoAm, DunedinPACE).

We fitted linear regression models, unadjusted and adjusted for established risk factors, and found the following associations for unemployment (years of acceleration): HorvathAA (1.51, 95% CI 0.08, 2.95), GrimAgeAA (1.53, 95% CI 0.16, 2.90) and 3.21 years for PhenoAA (95% CI 0.89, 5.33). Job insecurity increased PhenoAA (1.83, 95% CI 0.003, 3.67), while working at night was associated with an increase of 2.12 years in GrimAgeAA (95% CI 0.69, 3.55). We found effects of unemployment to be stronger in men and effects of night shift work to be stronger in women.

These results provide evidence of associations between unemployment with accelerated ageing and suggest that insecure employment and night work may also increase age acceleration. Our findings have implications for policies relating to current changes in working conditions and highlight the utility of biological age biomarkers in studies in younger populations without long-term health information.