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Aging clocks

PCPhenoAge

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PCPhenoAge is a technically refined variant of DNAm PhenoAge introduced by Higgins-Chen and colleagues (2022) that applies principal-component (PC) regression to the underlying CpG data before computing the age score. The PC transformation removes technical noise and batch effects that inflate variance in standard methylation arrays, yielding a clock with substantially improved test-retest reliability and reduced sensitivity to sample quality or preprocessing pipeline. In practice, PCPhenoAge retains the mortality-predictive validity of its predecessor while being more suitable for longitudinal studies and intervention trials where within-individual change is the primary outcome.

Sources

  1. Higgins-Chen AT, Thrush KL, Wang Y, Minteer CJ, Kuo PL, Wang M, Niimi P, Sturm G, Lin J, Moore AZ, Bandinelli S, Vinkers CH, Vermetten E, Rutten BPF, Geuze E, Okhuijsen-Pfeifer C, van der Horst MZ, Schreiter S, Gutwinski S, Luykx JJ, Picard M, Ferrucci L, Poganik JR, Bhanu NV, Garcia BA, Horvath S, Raj K, Levine ME. (2022). Epigenetic principal component analysis-based clocks (PC clocks) accurate across tissues. *Nature Aging*doi:10.1038/s43587-022-00248-2