Biological Age & Stress with Dr. Jesse Poganik

If you’re human, I’m sure you’ve been stressed out at some point in time. Unfortunately, it is an inevitable occurrence during any stage of life. Not only does stress make you feel older, in a very real sense, it can speed up aging. But, what if you could reverse your increased aging following recovery from that stress? 

In this week’s Everything Epigenetics podcast, Dr. Jesse Pognaik speaks with me about just that. We take a deep dive into his study which focuses on Biological Age being increased by stress and if it can be restored upon recovery.

First, we discuss possible fluctuations in Biological Age by using a mouse model of heterochronic parabiosis.

Then, how Dr. Poganik and his team applied a suite of advanced epigenetic age clocks in humans and mice to measure reversible biological age changes in response to various stressful stimuli including trauma surgery in elderly patients, pregnancy, and severe COVID-19. This incredible study uncovers a new layer of aging dynamics which should be considered in future studies. Furthermore, elevation of biological age by stress may be a quantifiable and actionable target for future interventions.

Dr. Poganik is now actively working on answering the question, “Which clocks are actually measuring biological aging?”, as the current models do not discriminate between casual methylation changes.

In this podcast you’ll hear:

• The definition of stress in the context of Jesse’s paper
• Heterochronic parabiosis defined and explained
• The connection between severe stress and aging using Biological Age clocks
• How unexpected surgeries and elected surgeries affect Biological Age 
• Improvement of Biological Age after surgeries
• How pregnancy affects Biological Age
• Pregnancy and the connection to parabiosis 
• The peak risks at the time of delivery of pregnancy in mice and human systems 
• Recovery of Biological Age after pregnancy
• Severe COVID-19 and the effects on Biological Aging
• Partial recovery upon COVID-19 patients after being discharged 
• The need to study long COVID-19 
• How Dr. Poganik decided upon the stressors of interest 
• The suite of Epigenetic Clocks used in the study
• First generation clocks vs. second generation clocks
• The precision of Epigenetic Clocks
• Principal component analysis algorithms 
• The future of DNA methylation (DNAm) clocks
• The need to understand which clocks measure what 
• What is aging? 

Dr. Jesse Poganik
Jesse Poganik was born and raised in Queens, New York, USA. He received his B.S. in Chemistry from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Chemical Biology from Cornell University. In 2020, he began his postdoctoral training in Prof. Vadim Gladyshev’s laboratory at Brigham and W

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Thank you for joining us at the Everything Epigenetics Podcast and remember you have control over your Epigenetics, so tune in next time to learn more about how to harness this knowledge for your benefit.