Abstract

To determine if disease can modify aging patterns in an affected tissue without altering the aging patterns of other tissues, blood and semen of individuals with oligozoospermia (n = 10) were compared to the blood and semen of individuals with normozoospermia (n = 24). DNA methylation data was obtained via Illumina's 850 K array. The Horvath and Jenkins age calculators were then utilized to predict the epigenetic age of blood and sperm. Epigenetic age of sperm was approximated using germ-line age differential (GLAD) values. Using nonpaired t-tests, it was found that sperm of oligozoospermic men (mean GLAD score of 0.078) were predicted to be significantly older than the sperm of normozoospermic men (mean GLAD score of -0.017), returning a p-value of 0.03. However, there was not a significant epigenetic age difference between the blood of those with oligozoospermia (mean GLAD equivalent score of -0.027) and normozoospermia (mean GLAD equivalent score of 0.048), producing a p-value of 0.20. These results lead to the conclusion that tissue specific aging is occurring in sperm of oligozoospermic individuals but not in unaffected somatic tissues (in this case, blood).

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