Aging & Social Change: Fourteenth Interdisciplinary Conference

Abstract

Recent work has used such epigenetic clocks to highlight inequality in rates of biological aging across the socioeconomic spectrum. However, the extent to which existing epigenetic clocks – which have been developed using adult samples – index biological aging in children remains unclear. Moreover, exactly how early in the life course detectable socioeconomic inequalities in biological aging begin to emerge is largely unknown. This study uses unique data from the Future Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS). The FFCWS follows a cohort of 4,898 children born between 1998 and 2000 and includes repeated measures of children’s DNA methylation age profiles at age 9 (i.e., childhood) and age 15 (i.e., adolescence). To my knowledge, it is the only dataset with repeated biological data on a representative child sample, making it vital to answer our main questions: Do adult-trained biological clocks appear to meaningfully index aging in samples of children, and to what extent does maternal socioeconomic status explain differences in biological aging among children? We find that first and second-generation clocks trained on adult samples predict chronological age in children at ages 9 and 15. Results also show maternal income at birth, at ages 9 and 15, are associated with changes in DNAmGrimAge and Dunedin epigenetic clocks across childhood and adolescence.