Published in Epigenetics
The Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) theory predicts that prenatal and early life events shape adult health outcomes. Birth weight is a useful indicator of the foetal experience and has been associated with multiple adult health outcomes. DNA methylation (DNAm) is one plausible mechanism behind the relationship of birth weight to...
Published in International journal of epidemiology
People who opt to participate in scientific studies tend to be healthier, wealthier and more educated than the broader population. Although selection bias does not always pose a problem for analysing the relationships between exposures and diseases or other outcomes, it can lead to biased effect size estimates. Biased estimates may weaken the utili...
Published in Clinical Epigenetics
BackgroundDNA methylation outlier burden has been suggested as a potential marker of biological age. An outlier is typically defined as DNA methylation levels at any one CpG site that are three times beyond the inter-quartile range from the 25th or 75th percentiles compared to the rest of the population. DNA methylation outlier burden (the number o...
Published in Genome Medicine
BackgroundAdvanced age is associated with cognitive and physical decline and is a major risk factor for a multitude of disorders. There is also a gap in life expectancy between males and females. DNA methylation differences have been shown to be associated with both age and sex. Here, we investigate age-by-sex differences in blood-based DNA methyla...
Published in Wellcome Open Research
Background: Generation Scotland (GS) is a population and family-based study of genetic and environmental health determinants. Recruitment to the Scottish Family Health Study component of GS took place between 2006-2011. Participants were aged 18 or over and consented to genetic studies, linkage to health records and recontact. Several recontact exe...
Published in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
Synaesthesia is a neurological phenomenon affecting perception, where triggering stimuli (e.g. letters and numbers) elicit unusual secondary sensory experiences (e.g. colours). Family-based studies point to a role for genetic factors in the development of this trait. However, the contributions of common genomic variation to synaesthesia have not ye...
Published in Wellcome open research
Background: DNA methylation reflects health-related environmental exposures and genetic risk, providing insights into aetiological mechanisms and potentially predicting disease onset, progression and treatment response. An increasingly recognised need for large-scale, longitudinally-profiled samples collected world-wide has made the development of ...
Published in Wellcome open research
Background: Twin studies indicate that genetic and environmental factors contribute to both psychological resilience and coping style, but estimates of their relative molecular and shared environmental contributions are limited. The degree of overlap in the genetic architectures of these traits is also unclear. Methods: Using data from a large popu...
Published in Alzheimer's & dementia (Amsterdam, Netherlands)
The "epigenetic clock" is a DNA methylation-based estimate of biological age and is correlated with chronological age-the greatest risk factor for Alzheimer's disease (AD). Genetic and environmental risk factors exist for AD, several of which are potentially modifiable. In this study, we assess the relationship between the epigenetic clock and AD r...
Published in Journal of virology
The genomes of human herpesvirus 6A (HHV-6A) and HHV-6B have the capacity to integrate into telomeres, the essential capping structures of chromosomes that play roles in cancer and ageing. About 1% of people worldwide are carriers of chromosomally integrated HHV-6 (ciHHV-6), which is inherited as a genetic trait. Understanding the consequences of i...
