The company says the test is trained by correlating methylation data from approximately 200,000 sites, with an overall score for health and lifestyle reflecting presumed differences in physiological ageing. Credit: Shutterstock / Dikushin Dmitry

Researchers from  New York-based company Tally Health have published new research that found  its CheekAge swab test can predict a host of mortality factors and ‘epigenic clocks’.

The study, published in the journal Frontiers in Aging, concluded that the CheekAge test can accurately predict mortality taking a single cheek swab as input. Previously examining a patient’s risk of mortality had involved collecting DNA samples from blood cells. As a result, researchers have developed what are called epigenic clocks that estimate a person’s biological age by measuring changes in DNA methylation patterns over time.

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Now, researchers at Tally Health alongside the University of Edinburgh, claim the CheekAge test can significantly simplify the collection of methylation data through cheek cells, opening the way for greater commercialisation of the test.

The company says the test is trained by correlating methylation data from approximately 200,000 sites, with an overall score for health and lifestyle reflecting presumed differences in physiological ageing.

In the most recent study, researchers used statistical programming to see how well the test  predicted mortality from any cause in 1,513 women and men, born in 1921 and 1936 and followed throughout life by the Lothian Birth Cohorts (LBC) program of the University of Edinburgh. Lothian Birth Cohorts is a psychological research group aiming to link the differences in cognitive ageing to lifestyle and psychosocial factors using brain imaging data.

Every three years, the volunteers had their methylome in blood cells measured at approximately 450,000 DNA methylation sites. The last available methylation time point was used along with the mortality status to calculate CheekAge and its association with mortality risk. Data on mortality had been obtained from the Scottish National Health Service (NHS) Central Register.

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Maxim Shokhirev, study author and head of computational biology at Tally Health, said: “We also demonstrate that specific methylation sites are especially important for this correlation, revealing potential links between specific genes and processes and human mortality captured by our clock.

“CheekAge is significantly associated with mortality in a longitudinal dataset and outcompetes first-generation clocks trained in datasets containing blood data. The fact that our epigenetic clock trained on cheek cells predicts mortality when measuring the methylome in blood cells suggests there are common mortality signals across tissues. This implies that a simple, non-invasive cheek swab can be a valuable alternative for studying and tracking the biology of ageing.”