By Xiangyuan Chi
April 18, 2023
A study co-authored by a Keck School of Medicine professor found an extremely rare aging pattern in which newborns with certain gestation complications could be born biologically younger than their peers.
Preeclampsia, a serious blood pressure condition that develops during pregnancy, and gestational diabetes were significantly associated with decelerated gestational aging in newborns in comparison to infants unexposed to these pregnancy implications. The national multisite cohort study that resulted in these findings was conducted under the National Institute of Health’s Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes program and was published in JAMA Network Open in February.
This decelerated aging pattern is almost unprecedented in epigenetics — the study of how chemical modifications to genomes might influence gene expression or the magnitude of gene expression.
“In aging research, if your epigenetic ‘clock’ shows an older age than your chronological age — due to exposures to various stressors — that’s viewed as bad, as putting people at increased risks for illness,” said corresponding author Carrie Breton, a professor of population and public health sciences at Keck. “So, I [thought] we might see the same thing in the womb, but we didn’t. We saw the opposite effect.”