The risk of early death was assessed based on the cheeks and cheekbones

Scientists were able to calculate the rate of aging

Many behavioral and lifestyle factors can accelerate aging, including stress, poor sleep, poor diet, smoking and alcohol consumption. These impacts leave a mark on the genome in the form of epigenetic marks, which makes it possible to quantify molecular aging by analyzing the epigenome at predictive genomic regions.

Over the past decade, scientists have developed several “epigenetic clocks” that are calibrated to take into account the chronological age and various lifestyle factors of a large number of people. Most of them focus on DNA methylation in blood cells. However, in 2024, American researchers created a “second-generation clock” called CheekAge, which uses data from cells easily collected from the cheeks.

In the new study, the team demonstrated for the first time that the cheekbone can accurately predict mortality risk.

“We also showed that certain methylation sites are particularly important for this correlation, revealing potential links between certain genes and processes associated with human mortality that are recorded by our clocks,” said biologist Maxim Shokhirev.

CheekAge's technology was developed by analyzing the methylation of approximately 200,000 sites with an overall health and lifestyle score reflecting predicted differences in physiological aging.

The study used statistical programming to evaluate how well CheekAge predicted mortality from all causes.

The respondents had their methylome levels measured in their blood cells at approximately 450 thousand DNA methylation sites. To calculate age and its relationship with mortality risk.

“Our results show that cheekbone is significantly associated with mortality in a longitudinal dataset and outperforms first-generation measures trained on blood data,” the authors of the analysis concluded.

Specifically, for every one standard deviation increase in cheekbones, the risk of all-cause mortality increased by 21 percent. This suggests a strong association between cheekbones and mortality risk among older adults.

“The fact that our epigenetic clock based on cheek cells predicts mortality when analyzing the methylome in blood cells suggests that there are common mortality signals in all tissues,” Shokhirev added. “This opens up the possibility of using a simple and non-invasive cheek swab to study and track the biology of aging.”