McKinney Brandon C, Lin Huang, Ding Ying, Lewis David A, Sweet Robert A
Departments of Psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA USA.
Departments of Biostatistics, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA USA.
NPJ Schizophr. 2017 Mar 23;3:13. doi: 10.1038/s41537-017-0017-5. eCollection 2017.
The accelerated aging hypothesis of schizophrenia posits that physiological changes throughout the body that are associated with normal aging occur at an earlier age in individuals with schizophrenia. Testing this hypothesis has been limited by problems measuring biological age. Recently, a method using DNA methylation levels at 353 genomic sites to produce "DNA methylation age", an estimate of tissue biological age, was described and validated. We used this method to test the hypothesis in the postmortem superior temporal gyrus of 22 non-psychiatric control and 22 schizophrenia subjects. DNA methylation age correlated with chronological age in both non-psychiatric control ( = 0.95, < 0.0001) and schizophrenia subjects ( = 0.96, < 0.0001). Age acceleration did not differ between non-psychiatric control and schizophrenia subjects ( = 1.27, = 0.21). Our findings suggest there is no acceleration of brain aging in schizophrenia. Larger studies using samples from multiple brain regions and homogenous cell populations will be necessary to confirm these findings.
精神分裂症的加速衰老假说认为，与正常衰老相关的全身生理变化在精神分裂症患者中会在更早的年龄出现。由于测量生物学年龄存在问题，对这一假说的检验受到了限制。最近，一种利用353个基因组位点的DNA甲基化水平来产生“DNA甲基化年龄”（一种组织生物学年龄的估计值）的方法被描述并得到了验证。我们使用这种方法在22名非精神疾病对照者和22名精神分裂症患者的死后颞上回中对该假说进行了检验。在非精神疾病对照者（r = 0.95，P < 0.0001）和精神分裂症患者（r = 0.96，P < 0.0001）中，DNA甲基化年龄均与实际年龄相关。非精神疾病对照者和精神分裂症患者之间的年龄加速情况没有差异（P = 1.27，P = 0.21）。我们的研究结果表明，精神分裂症患者不存在大脑衰老加速的情况。需要使用来自多个脑区和同质细胞群体的样本进行更大规模的研究来证实这些发现。
