scholarly journals Role of sleep quality in the acceleration of biological aging and its potential for preventive interaction on air pollution insults: findings from the UK Biobank cohort

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xu Gao ◽  
Ninghao Huang ◽  
Tao Huang

Background: Sleep has been associated with aging and relevant health outcomes, but their causal relationship remains inconclusive. Methods: In this study, we investigated the associations of sleep behaviors with biological ages (BAs) among 363,886 middle and elderly-aged adults from UK Biobank. Sleep index (0 [worst]-6 [best]) of each participant was retrieved from six sleep behaviors: snoring, chronotype, daytime sleepiness, sleep duration, insomnia, and difficulties in getting up. Two BAs, the KDM-biological age and PhenoAge, were estimated by corresponding algorithms based on clinical traits, and their discrepancies with chronological age were defined as the age accelerations (AAs). Results: We first observed negative associations between the sleep index and the two AAs, and demonstrated that the change of AAs could be the consequence of sleep quality using Mendelian randomization with genetic risk scores of sleep index and BAs. Particularly, one unit increase in sleep index was associated with 0.105- and 0.125-year decreases in KDM-biological age acceleration and PhenoAge acceleration, respectively. Furthermore, we observed significant independent and joint effects of sleep and air pollution (i.e. PM2.5 and NO2), another key driver of aging, on BAs. Sleep quality also showed modifying effect on the associations of elevated PM2.5 and NO2 levels with accelerated aging. For instance, an interquartile range increase in PM2.5 level was associated with 0.011-, 0.047-, and 0.078-year increase in PhenoAge acceleration among people with high (5-6), medium (3-4), and low (0-2) sleep index, respectively. Conclusions: Our findings elucidate that better sleep quality could lessen accelerated biological aging resulting from exogenous exposures including air pollution.

Author(s):  
Chia-Ling Kuo ◽  
Luke C. Pilling ◽  
Janice L Atkins ◽  
Jane AH Masoli ◽  
João Delgado ◽  
...  

AbstractWith no known treatments or vaccine, COVID-19 presents a major threat, particularly to older adults, who account for the majority of severe illness and deaths. The age-related susceptibility is partly explained by increased comorbidities including dementia and type II diabetes [1]. While it is unclear why these diseases predispose risk, we hypothesize that increased biological age, rather than chronological age, may be driving disease-related trends in COVID-19 severity with age. To test this hypothesis, we applied our previously validated biological age measure (PhenoAge) [2] composed of chronological age and nine clinical chemistry biomarkers to data of 347,751 participants from a large community cohort in the United Kingdom (UK Biobank), recruited between 2006 and 2010. Other data included disease diagnoses (to 2017), mortality data (to 2020), and the UK national COVID-19 test results (to May 31, 2020) [3]. Accelerated aging 10-14 years prior to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic was associated with test positivity (OR=1.15 per 5-year acceleration, 95% CI: 1.08 to 1.21, p=3.2×10−6) and all-cause mortality with test-confirmed COVID-19 (OR=1.25, per 5-year acceleration, 95% CI: 1.09 to 1.44, p=0.002) after adjustment for demographics including current chronological age and pre-existing diseases or conditions. The corresponding areas under the curves were 0.669 and 0.803, respectively. Biological aging, as captured by PhenoAge, is a better predictor of COVID-19 severity than chronological age, and may inform risk stratification initiatives, while also elucidating possible underlying mechanisms, particularly those related to inflammaging.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 678-678
Author(s):  
Chia-Ling Kuo ◽  
Luke Pilling ◽  
Janice Atkins ◽  
Jane Masoli ◽  
João Delgado ◽  
...  

Abstract Age and disease prevalence are the two biggest risk factors for COVID-19 symptom severity and death. We therefore hypothesized that increased biological age, beyond chronological age, may be driving disease-related trends in COVID-19 severity. Using the UK Biobank England data, we tested whether a biological age estimate (PhenoAge) measured more than a decade prior to the COVID-19 pandemic was predictive of two COVID-19 severity outcomes (inpatient test positivity and COVID-19 related mortality with inpatient test-confirmed COVID-19). Logistic regression models were used with adjustment for age at the pandemic, sex, ethnicity, baseline assessment centers, and pre-existing diseases/conditions. 613 participants tested positive at inpatient settings between March 16 and April 27, 2020, 154 of whom succumbed to COVID-19. PhenoAge was associated with increased risks of inpatient test positivity and COVID-19 related mortality (ORMortality=1.63 per 5 years, 95% CI: 1.43-1.86, p=4.7x10E-13) adjusting for demographics including age at the pandemic. Further adjustment for pre-existing disease s/conditions at baseline (OR_M=1.50, 95% CI: 1.30-1.73 per 5 years, p=3.1x10E-8) and at the early pandemic (OR_M=1.21, 95% CI: 1.04-1.40 per 5 years, p=0.011) decreased the association. PhenoAge measured in 2006-2010 was associated with COVID-19 severity outcomes more than 10 years later. These associations were partly accounted for by prevalent chronic diseases proximate to COVID-19 infection. Overall, our results suggest that aging biomarkers, like PhenoAge may capture long-term vulnerability to diseases like COVID-19, even before the accumulation of age-related comorbid conditions.


Author(s):  
Chia-Ling Kuo ◽  
Luke C Pilling ◽  
Janice L Atkins ◽  
Jane A H Masoli ◽  
João Delgado ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Age and disease prevalence are the two biggest risk factors for COVID-19 symptom severity and death. We therefore hypothesized that increased biological age, beyond chronological age, may be driving disease-related trends in COVID-19 severity. Methods Using the UK Biobank England data, we tested whether a biological age estimate (PhenoAge) measured more than a decade prior to the COVID-19 pandemic was predictive of two COVID-19 severity outcomes (inpatient test positivity and COVID-19 related mortality with inpatient test-confirmed COVID-19). Logistic regression models were used with adjustment for age at the pandemic, sex, ethnicity, baseline assessment centers, and pre-existing diseases/conditions. Results 613 participants tested positive at inpatient settings between March 16 and April 27, 2020, 154 of whom succumbed to COVID-19. PhenoAge was associated with increased risks of inpatient test positivity and COVID-19 related mortality (ORMortality=1.63 per 5 years, 95% CI: 1.43-1.86, p=4.7×10 -13) adjusting for demographics including age at the pandemic. Further adjustment for pre-existing disease s/conditions at baseline (ORM=1.50, 95% CI: 1.30-1.73 per 5 years, p=3.1×10 -8) and at the early pandemic (ORM=1.21, 95% CI: 1.04-1.40 per 5 years, p=0.011) decreased the association. Conclusions PhenoAge measured in 2006-2010 was associated with COVID-19 severity outcomes more than 10 years later. These associations were partly accounted for by prevalent chronic diseases proximate to COVID-19 infection. Overall, our results suggest that aging biomarkers, like PhenoAge may capture long-term vulnerability to diseases like COVID-19, even before the accumulation of age-related comorbid conditions.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 332-333
Author(s):  
Chia-Ling Kuo ◽  
Luke Pilling ◽  
Janice Atkins ◽  
Jane Masoli ◽  
Joao Delgado ◽  
...  

Abstract Age and disease prevalence are the two biggest risk factors for COVID-19 symptom severity and death. We therefore hypothesized that increased biological age, beyond chronological age, may be driving disease-related trends in COVID-19 severity. Using the UK Biobank England data, we tested whether a biological age estimate (PhenoAge) measured more than a decade prior to the COVID-19 pandemic was predictive of two COVID-19 severity outcomes (inpatient test positivity and COVID-19 related mortality with inpatient test-confirmed COVID-19). Logistic regression models were used with adjustment for age at the pandemic, sex, ethnicity, baseline assessment centers, and pre-existing diseases/conditions. 613 participants tested positive at inpatient settings between March 16 and April 27, 2020, 154 of whom succumbed to COVID-19. PhenoAge was associated with increased risks of inpatient test positivity and COVID-19 related mortality (ORMortality=1.63 per 5 years, 95% CI: 1.43-1.86, p=4.7x10E-13) adjusting for demographics including age at the pandemic. Further adjustment for pre-existing disease s/conditions at baseline (OR_M=1.50, 95% CI: 1.30-1.73 per 5 years, p=3.1x10E-8) and at the early pandemic (OR_M=1.21, 95% CI: 1.04-1.40 per 5 years, p=0.011) decreased the association. PhenoAge measured in 2006-2010 was associated with COVID-19 severity outcomes more than 10 years later. These associations were partly accounted for by prevalent chronic diseases proximate to COVID-19 infection. Overall, our results suggest that aging biomarkers, like PhenoAge may capture long-term vulnerability to diseases like COVID-19, even before the accumulation of age-related comorbid conditions.


2020 ◽  
Vol 41 (Supplement_2) ◽  
Author(s):  
D Radenkovic ◽  
S.C Chawla ◽  
G Botta ◽  
A Boli ◽  
M.B Banach ◽  
...  

Abstract   The two leading causes of mortality worldwide are cardiovascular disease (CVD) and cancer. The annual total cost of CVD and cancer is an estimated $844.4 billion in the US and is projected to double by 2030. Thus, there has been an increased shift to preventive medicine to improve health outcomes and development of risk scores, which allow early identification of individuals at risk to target personalised interventions and prevent disease. Our aim was to define a Risk Score R(x) which, given the baseline characteristics of a given individual, outputs the relative risk for composite CVD, cancer incidence and all-cause mortality. A non-linear model was used to calculate risk scores based on the participants of the UK Biobank (= 502548). The model used parameters including patient characteristics (age, sex, ethnicity), baseline conditions, lifestyle factors of diet and physical activity, blood pressure, metabolic markers and advanced lipid variables, including ApoA and ApoB and lipoprotein(a), as input. The risk score was defined by normalising the risk function by a fixed value, the average risk of the training set. To fit the non-linear model >400,000 participants were used as training set and >45,000 participants were used as test set for validation. The exponent of risk function was represented as a multilayer neural network. This allowed capturing interdependent behaviour of covariates, training a single model for all outcomes, and preserving heterogeneity of the groups, which is in contrast to CoxPH models which are traditionally used in risk scores and require homogeneous groups. The model was trained over 60 epochs and predictive performance was determined by the C-index with standard errors and confidence intervals estimated with bootstrap sampling. By inputing the variables described, one can obtain personalised hazard ratios for 3 major outcomes of CVD, cancer and all-cause mortality. Therefore, an individual with a risk Score of e.g. 1.5, at any time he/she has 50% more chances than average of experiencing the corresponding event. The proposed model showed the following discrimination, for risk of CVD (C-index = 0.8006), cancer incidence (C-index = 0.6907), and all-cause mortality (C-index = 0.7770) on the validation set. The CVD model is particularly strong (C-index >0.8) and is an improvement on a previous CVD risk prediction model also based on classical risk factors with total cholesterol and HDL-c on the UK Biobank data (C-index = 0.7444) published last year (Welsh et al. 2019). Unlike classically-used CoxPH models, our model considers correlation of variables as shown by the table of the values of correlation in Figure 1. This is an accurate model that is based on the most comprehensive set of patient characteristics and biomarkers, allowing clinicians to identify multiple targets for improvement and practice active preventive cardiology in the era of precision medicine. Figure 1. Correlation of variables in the R(x) Funding Acknowledgement Type of funding source: None


Genes ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (7) ◽  
pp. 991
Author(s):  
Erik Widen ◽  
Timothy G. Raben ◽  
Louis Lello ◽  
Stephen D. H. Hsu

We use UK Biobank data to train predictors for 65 blood and urine markers such as HDL, LDL, lipoprotein A, glycated haemoglobin, etc. from SNP genotype. For example, our Polygenic Score (PGS) predictor correlates ∼0.76 with lipoprotein A level, which is highly heritable and an independent risk factor for heart disease. This may be the most accurate genomic prediction of a quantitative trait that has yet been produced (specifically, for European ancestry groups). We also train predictors of common disease risk using blood and urine biomarkers alone (no DNA information); we call these predictors biomarker risk scores, BMRS. Individuals who are at high risk (e.g., odds ratio of >5× population average) can be identified for conditions such as coronary artery disease (AUC∼0.75), diabetes (AUC∼0.95), hypertension, liver and kidney problems, and cancer using biomarkers alone. Our atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) predictor uses ∼10 biomarkers and performs in UKB evaluation as well as or better than the American College of Cardiology ASCVD Risk Estimator, which uses quite different inputs (age, diagnostic history, BMI, smoking status, statin usage, etc.). We compare polygenic risk scores (risk conditional on genotype: PRS) for common diseases to the risk predictors which result from the concatenation of learned functions BMRS and PGS, i.e., applying the BMRS predictors to the PGS output.


Author(s):  
Eirini Dimakakou ◽  
Helinor J. Johnston ◽  
George Streftaris ◽  
John W. Cherrie

Human exposure to particulate air pollution (e.g., PM2.5) can lead to adverse health effects, with compelling evidence that it can increase morbidity and mortality from respiratory and cardiovascular disease. More recently, there has also been evidence that long-term environmental exposure to particulate air pollution is associated with type-2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) and dementia. There are many occupations that may expose workers to airborne particles and that some exposures in the workplace are very similar to environmental particulate pollution. We conducted a cross-sectional analysis of the UK Biobank cohort to verify the association between environmental particulate air pollution (PM2.5) exposure and T2DM and dementia, and to investigate if occupational exposure to particulates that are similar to those found in environmental air pollution could increase the odds of developing these diseases. The UK Biobank dataset comprises of over 500,000 participants from all over the UK. Environmental exposure variables were used from the UK Biobank. To estimate occupational exposure both the UK Biobank’s data and information from a job exposure matrix, specifically developed for UK Biobank (Airborne Chemical Exposure–Job Exposure Matrix (ACE JEM)), were used. The outcome measures were participants with T2DM and dementia. In appropriately adjusted models, environmental exposure to PM2.5 was associated with an odds ratio (OR) of 1.02 (95% CI 1.00 to 1.03) per unit exposure for developing T2DM, while PM2.5 was associated with an odds ratio of 1.06 (95% CI 0.96 to 1.16) per unit exposure for developing dementia. These environmental results align with existing findings in the published literature. Five occupational exposures (dust, fumes, diesel, mineral, and biological dust in the most recent job estimated with the ACE JEM) were investigated and the risks for most exposures for T2DM and for all the exposures for dementia were not significantly increased in the adjusted models. This was confirmed in a subgroup of participants where a full occupational history was available allowed an estimate of workplace exposures. However, when not adjusting for gender, some of the associations become significant, which suggests that there might be a bias between the occupational assessments for men and women. The results of the present study do not provide clear evidence of an association between occupational exposure to particulate matter and T2DM or dementia.


PLoS Medicine ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (10) ◽  
pp. e1003782
Author(s):  
Michael Wainberg ◽  
Samuel E. Jones ◽  
Lindsay Melhuish Beaupre ◽  
Sean L. Hill ◽  
Daniel Felsky ◽  
...  

Background Sleep problems are both symptoms of and modifiable risk factors for many psychiatric disorders. Wrist-worn accelerometers enable objective measurement of sleep at scale. Here, we aimed to examine the association of accelerometer-derived sleep measures with psychiatric diagnoses and polygenic risk scores in a large community-based cohort. Methods and findings In this post hoc cross-sectional analysis of the UK Biobank cohort, 10 interpretable sleep measures—bedtime, wake-up time, sleep duration, wake after sleep onset, sleep efficiency, number of awakenings, duration of longest sleep bout, number of naps, and variability in bedtime and sleep duration—were derived from 7-day accelerometry recordings across 89,205 participants (aged 43 to 79, 56% female, 97% self-reported white) taken between 2013 and 2015. These measures were examined for association with lifetime inpatient diagnoses of major depressive disorder, anxiety disorders, bipolar disorder/mania, and schizophrenia spectrum disorders from any time before the date of accelerometry, as well as polygenic risk scores for major depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. Covariates consisted of age and season at the time of the accelerometry recording, sex, Townsend deprivation index (an indicator of socioeconomic status), and the top 10 genotype principal components. We found that sleep pattern differences were ubiquitous across diagnoses: each diagnosis was associated with a median of 8.5 of the 10 accelerometer-derived sleep measures, with measures of sleep quality (for instance, sleep efficiency) generally more affected than mere sleep duration. Effect sizes were generally small: for instance, the largest magnitude effect size across the 4 diagnoses was β = −0.11 (95% confidence interval −0.13 to −0.10, p = 3 × 10−56, FDR = 6 × 10−55) for the association between lifetime inpatient major depressive disorder diagnosis and sleep efficiency. Associations largely replicated across ancestries and sexes, and accelerometry-derived measures were concordant with self-reported sleep properties. Limitations include the use of accelerometer-based sleep measurement and the time lag between psychiatric diagnoses and accelerometry. Conclusions In this study, we observed that sleep pattern differences are a transdiagnostic feature of individuals with lifetime mental illness, suggesting that they should be considered regardless of diagnosis. Accelerometry provides a scalable way to objectively measure sleep properties in psychiatric clinical research and practice, even across tens of thousands of individuals.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melis Anatürk ◽  
Raihaan Patel ◽  
Georgios Georgiopoulos ◽  
Danielle Newby ◽  
Anya Topiwala ◽  
...  

INTRODUCTION: Current prognostic models of dementia have had limited success in consistently identifying at-risk individuals. We aimed to develop and validate a novel dementia risk score (DRS) using the UK Biobank cohort.METHODS: After randomly dividing the sample into a training (n=166,487, 80%) and test set (n=41,621, 20%), logistic LASSO regression and standard logistic regression were used to develop the UKB-DRS.RESULTS: The score consisted of age, sex, education, apolipoprotein E4 genotype, a history of diabetes, stroke, and depression, and a family history of dementia. The UKB-DRS had good-to-strong discrimination accuracy in the UKB hold-out sample (AUC [95%CI]=0.79 [0.77, 0.82]) and in an external dataset (Whitehall II cohort, AUC [95%CI]=0.83 [0.79,0.87]). The UKB-DRS also significantly outperformed four published risk scores (i.e., Australian National University Alzheimer’s Disease Risk Index (ANU-ADRI), Cardiovascular Risk Factors, Aging, and Dementia score (CAIDE), Dementia Risk Score (DRS), and the Framingham Cardiovascular Risk Score (FRS) across both test sets.CONCLUSION: The UKB-DRS represents a novel easy-to-use tool that could be used for routine care or targeted selection of at-risk individuals into clinical trials.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document