The study looked at 237 rhesus macaques. I can only read the abstract, which doesn't clarify how they determined their early life adversity.
The abstract doesn't make very strong claims about how much an impact they saw, only that they started to see some patterns emerge.
The patterns were also not even consistent in the same direction, with some of their measurements correlating adversity with changes that "looked like" the opposite of accelerated aging.
> "In some cases, adversity-related changes looked like accelerated aging. In others, they went in the opposite direction," explained co-lead author Rachel Petersen
I would like to read the full paper, but this feels like there are several layers of PR speak on top of what they were studying.
Many factors can impact the markers they're measuring, including body size, so this paper shouldn't be used as evidence that we can measure trauma directly or anything like that. They were searching for patterns and differences, but there isn't a clear or even uni-directional link with adversity.
Maybe colleges and scholarships that make admission decisions based on adversity can someday objectively measure it by DNA methylation. Also for reparations or welfare benefits. It would seem to be a more direct proxy than melanin pigment density.
But on the other hand, adversity does not equal disadvantage, and in fact the trials that leave those marks -- beneath some threshold -- may bestow an advantage over their unstressed peers. Like released hatchery fish have ~10% of the survival rate of wild fish.
A low methylation score could be interpreted as a call to mature a child's tissues more rapidly by the curated application of adversity.
> released hatchery fish have ~10% of the survival rate of wild fish.
Is that inclusive of the entire egg->fry->fish cycle? I wouldn't be surprised if wild fish had extremely high "infant mortality" compared to hatchery fish
Maybe colleges can just accept the best students and do their job of educating them instead of arrogantly appointing themselves as saviors and righters of all wrongs in the world.
> In this study, researchers developed highly precise tissue-specific clocks, capable of predicting age within about one year of an individual's chronological age.
So if all of this adversity related difference doesn't even throw off the chronological calculation of age by more than a year, how significant is it? Certainly there could be other effects beyond just aging, but is there any evidence of the actual effect size here?
The abstract doesn't make very strong claims about how much an impact they saw, only that they started to see some patterns emerge.
The patterns were also not even consistent in the same direction, with some of their measurements correlating adversity with changes that "looked like" the opposite of accelerated aging.
> "In some cases, adversity-related changes looked like accelerated aging. In others, they went in the opposite direction," explained co-lead author Rachel Petersen
I would like to read the full paper, but this feels like there are several layers of PR speak on top of what they were studying.
Many factors can impact the markers they're measuring, including body size, so this paper shouldn't be used as evidence that we can measure trauma directly or anything like that. They were searching for patterns and differences, but there isn't a clear or even uni-directional link with adversity.
But on the other hand, adversity does not equal disadvantage, and in fact the trials that leave those marks -- beneath some threshold -- may bestow an advantage over their unstressed peers. Like released hatchery fish have ~10% of the survival rate of wild fish.
A low methylation score could be interpreted as a call to mature a child's tissues more rapidly by the curated application of adversity.
Is that inclusive of the entire egg->fry->fish cycle? I wouldn't be surprised if wild fish had extremely high "infant mortality" compared to hatchery fish
So if all of this adversity related difference doesn't even throw off the chronological calculation of age by more than a year, how significant is it? Certainly there could be other effects beyond just aging, but is there any evidence of the actual effect size here?