Abstract
Childhood psychiatric symptoms may be associated with advanced biological aging. This study examined whether epigenetic age acceleration (EAA) associates with internalizing and externalizing symptoms that were prospectively collected across childhood in a longitudinal cohort study. At age 6 buccal epithelial cells from 148 children (69 girls) were collected to survey genome-wide DNA methylation. EAA was estimated using the Horvath clock. Internalizing symptoms at ages 2.5 and 4 years significantly predicted higher EAA at age 6, which in turn was significantly associated with internalizing symptoms at ages 6–10 years. Similar trends for externalizing symptoms did not reach statistical significance. These findings indicate advanced biological aging in relation to child mental health and may help better identify those at risk for lasting impairments associated with internalizing disorders.
Highlights
Common mental health disorders, such as anxiety and depression, result in chronic human suffering and come at a large economic cost (Whiteford et al, 2013)
We found that advanced biological aging at age 6, assessed by epigenetic age acceleration (EAA), was significantly associated with internalizing symptoms in children from the age of 2.5–10 years
Longitudinal assessment of psychiatric symptoms, health and EAA are needed to disentangle possible underlying mechanisms. This includes examining the specificity of the psychiatric symptoms that are most strongly associated with EAA, as we found greater evidence for the association of EAA with internalizing than with externalizing symptoms
Summary
Common mental health disorders, such as anxiety and depression, result in chronic human suffering and come at a large economic cost (Whiteford et al, 2013). Recent studies show that depressive symptoms in childhood and adolescence may be associated with advanced physical aging, such as early pubertal and adrenarcheal timing (Copeland, Worthman, Shanahan, Costello, & Angold, 2019; Ellis et al, 2019; Lewis et al, 2018), possibly due to early life adversity (Gur et al, 2019). We examine whether an indicator of advanced biological aging based on genomic DNA methylation, i.e., epigenetic age acceleration (EAA), is associated with childhood psychiatric symptoms. Previous studies indicate that EAA is an indicator of advanced physical maturation in younger populations, as demonstrated by early pubertal development and higher cortisol output in adolescence (Binder et al, 2018; Davis et al, 2017; Suarez, Lahti, Czamara, Lahti-Pulkkinen, Girchenko et al, 2018). We first examined whether early childhood symptoms predicted EAA at age 6, and secondly whether EAA at age 6 would predict symptom devel opment at ages 6–10
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