Submit an Article
Online ISSN: 1945-4589
Impact Journals, LLC. is the publisher of Aging: www.impactjournals.com.
Impact Journals is a member of the Wellcome Trust List of Compliant Publishers.
Impact Journals is a member of the Society for Scholarly Publishing.
Learn about our FREE Post-Publication Promotion Services

Alcohol Consumption and Epigenetic Age Acceleration Across Adulthood

11-14-2023

“Our findings may help to understand the role of alcohol-associated biological aging in the development of age-related diseases such as CVD and cancer.” 

Listen to an audio version of this press release

BUFFALO, NY- November 14, 2023 – A new research paper was published in Aging (listed by MEDLINE/PubMed as "Aging (Albany NY)" and "Aging-US" by Web of Science) Volume 15, Issue 20, entitled, “Alcohol consumption and epigenetic age acceleration across human adulthood.”

The alcohol-associated biological aging remains to be studied across adulthood. In their new study, researchers Mengyao Wang, Yi Li, Meng Lai, Drew R. Nannini, Lifang Hou, Roby Joehanes, Tianxiao Huan, Daniel Levy, Jiantao Ma, and Chunyu Liu from Boston University School of Public Health, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Framingham Heart Study, and Tufts University conducted linear regression analyses to investigate the associations between alcohol consumption and two DNA methylation-based biological age acceleration metrics in 3823 Framingham Heart Study participants (24–92 years and 53.8% women) adjusting for covariates. 

“We also investigated whether the two epigenetic aging metrics mediated the association of alcohol consumption with hypertension.”

They found that higher long-term average alcohol consumption was significantly associated with biological age acceleration assessed by GrimAge acceleration (GAA) and PhenoAge acceleration (PAA) in middle-aged (45–64 years, n = 1866) and older (65–92 years, n = 1267) participants while not in young participants (24–44 years, n = 690). For example, one additional standard drink of alcohol (~14 grams of ethanol per day) was associated with a 0.71 ± 0.15-year (p = 2.1e-6) and 0.60 ± 0.18-year (p = 7.5e-4) increase in PAA in middle-aged and older participants, respectively, but the association was not significant in young participants (p = 0.23). One additional standard serving of liquor (~14 grams of ethanol) was associated with a greater increase in GAA (0.82-year, p = 4.8e-4) and PAA (1.45-year, p = 7.4e-5) than beer (GAA: 0.45-year, p = 5.2e-4; PAA: 0.48-year, p = 0.02) and wine (GAA: 0.51-year, p = 0.02; PAA: 0.91-year, p = 0.008) in middle-aged participant group.

“We observed that up to 28% of the association between alcohol consumption and hypertension was mediated by GAA or PAA in the pooled sample. Our findings suggest that alcohol consumption is associated with greater biological aging quantified by epigenetic aging metrics, which may mediate the association of alcohol consumption with quantitative traits, such as hypertension.”

Read the full study: DOI: https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.205153

Corresponding Authors: Jiantao Ma, Chunyu Liu

Corresponding Emails: jiantao.ma@tufts.edu, liuc@bu.edu

Keywords: alcohol consumption, epigenetic aging, DNA methylation, hypertension

Sign up for free Altmetric alerts about this article: https://aging.altmetric.com/details/email_updates?id=10.18632%2Faging.https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.205153

About Aging-US:

The mission of the journal is to understand the mechanisms surrounding aging and age-related diseases, including cancer as the main cause of death in the modern aged population.

The journal aims to promote 1) treatment of age-related diseases by slowing down aging, 2) validation of anti-aging drugs by treating age-related diseases, and 3) prevention of cancer by inhibiting aging. (Cancer and COVID-19 are age-related diseases.)

Please visit our website at www.Aging-US.com and connect with us:

For media inquiries, please contact media@impactjournals.com.