Biological Aging & 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 risk 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?

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 Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School. Jesse’s current focus is on understanding the fundamental biological nature of aging.