Association between pace of aging estimated from blood DNA methylation and all-cause mortality: the HUNT study
Yi-Qian Sun, Ilona Urbarova, Lin Jiang, Therese Haugdahl Nøst, Xiao-Mei Mai · 2026
Read Association between pace of aging estimated from blood DNA methylation and all-cause mortality: the HUNT study by Yi-Qian Sun, Ilona Urbarova, Lin Jiang, Therese Haugdahl Nøst, Xiao-Mei Mai (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13188620.txt.
Description
Yi-Qian Sun and four co-authors linked the speed of aging, read from blood DNA, to death rates in a Norwegian population study, in this 2026 paper. Chemical marks on DNA can estimate a person's biological age and how fast it is advancing. Whether those measures hold steady over time, and what lifestyle factors move them, needed testing in a general population with repeat samples.
The team used 140 cancer-free adults from a long-running health study of Trøndelag county. Blood DNA was measured twice, in the mid-nineties and again about eleven years later, and deaths were tracked to 2023. Four established aging measures proved fairly reliable across the gap. University education went with slower aging, while smoking pointed the other way. The study connects a molecular pace-of-aging score to the hardest outcome of all, in ordinary people rather than patients.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Yi-Qian Sun, Ilona Urbarova, Lin Jiang, Therese Haugdahl Nøst, Xiao-Mei Mai |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 38 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |