How Alcohol Makes the Epigenetic Clock Tick Faster and the Clock Reversing Effect of Abstinence

This study investigated the recently reported association between alcohol dependence and accelerated ageing and the potential effects of abstinence and relapse on DNA methylation status using Levine's epigenetic clock to estimate DNA methylation age in two independent cohorts. The first sample comprised 88 (15 female) detoxified patients with alcohol use disorder (AUD) and 32 (5 female) healthy control (CON) subjects (NCT02615977), and the second included 69 (10 female) AUD patients that were followed up for 12 months with respect to relapse (n = 38, 4 female) and abstinence (n = 31, 6 female) (NCT01679145). To account for the different aspects of ageing captured by various clocks, we performed additional analyses of the first-generation Horvath clock and next-generation Zhang clock. To account for the genetic liability of AUD and its potential influence on DNA methylation, we calculated a polygenic risk score for alcohol dependence. We found that ageing was accelerated by 3.64 years in AUD patients compared with the CON group according to Levine's DNAm PhenoAge. Furthermore, in a second longitudinal sample, we found that abstaining AUD patients displayed a decrease in DNAm PhenoAge by 3.1 years, but we found an over proportional increase by 2.7 years in those who relapsed. Polygenic risk did not affect epigenetic ageing within our sample. These results confirm the age acceleration associated with AUD and provide the first evidence for a recovery of this effect upon abstinence from alcohol.