Assessing Effects of Vitamin D, Omega-3 and Exercise on Aging Clocks in Older People
The various aging clocks only become truly useful to the degree that there is enough existing data on their performance to understand whether or not one can trust their outputs for a given novel intervention targeting aging. A way to rapidly assess effects on biological age will steer the development of therapies towards the most effective approaches much more rapidly than is presently the case. Even through the clocks have issues, the largest of which being that the research community cannot link clock components to specific mechanisms of aging via a clear chain of cause and effect, using them broadly in as many human trials as possible is a good idea, including lifestyle interventions and supplements thought to have only modest effects. In this study, for example, researchers found that a few of these interventions slowed the increase of biological age over time in older people by something like 10%, on average.
While observational studies and small pilot trials suggest that vitamin D, omega-3, and exercise may slow biological aging, larger clinical trials testing these treatments individually or in combination are lacking. Here, we report the results of a post hoc analysis among 777 participants aged 70 years and older of the DO-HEALTH trial on the effect of vitamin D (2,000 IU per day) and/or omega-3 (1 g per day) and/or a home exercise program on four next-generation DNA methylation (DNAm) measures of biological aging (PhenoAge, GrimAge, GrimAge2 and DunedinPACE) over 3 years.
Omega-3 alone slowed the DNAm clocks PhenoAge, GrimAge2 and DunedinPACE, and all three treatments had additive benefits on PhenoAge. Overall, from baseline to year 3, standardized effects ranged from 0.16 to 0.32 units (2.9-3.8 months). In summary, our trial indicates a small protective effect of omega-3 treatment on slowing biological aging over 3 years across several clocks, with an additive protective effect of omega-3, vitamin D and exercise based on PhenoAge.