ArticleNature communications2025
Impact of age-related changes in buccal epithelial cells on pediatric epigenetic biomarker research.
Article in Nature communications, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Probing buccal-customized epigenetic clocks to investigate socioeconomic and health disparities.GeroScience · 2026Article
- Community threat, positive parenting, and accelerated epigenetic aging: Longitudinal links from childhood to adolescence.Child development · 2026Article
- Not all saliva samples are equal: The role of cellular heterogeneity in DNA methylation and epigenetic age analyses with biological and psychosocial factors.Psychoneuroendocrinology · 2026Article
- The Peripheral Epigenome Predicts White Matter Volume Contingent on Developmental Stage: An ECHO Study.Molecular neurobiology · 2025Article
- Applying blood-derived epigenetic algorithms to saliva: cross-tissue similarity of DNA-methylation indices of aging, physiology, and cognition.Clinical epigenetics · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
20 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Cheek swabs, heterogeneous samples consisting primarily of buccal epithelial cells, are widely used in pediatric DNA methylation studies and biomarker creation. However, the decrease in buccal proportion with age in adults remains unexamined in childhood. We analyzed cheek swabs from 4626 typically developing children 2-months to 20-years-old. Estimated buccal proportion declined throughout childhood with both increasing chronological and predicted epigenetic age. However, buccal proportion did not associate with age throughout adolescence. Variability in buccal proportion increased with age through the entire developmental range. These trends held inversely true for neutrophil proportions. Correcting for buccal proportion attenuated the weak association with PedBE age acceleration to non-significance during initial estimation. Notably, correcting for buccal proportion attenuated the association of PedBE age acceleration with obsessive-compulsive disorder and strengthened the association with diurnal cortisol slope. Thus, the age-related change in children's oral cells is a crucial consideration for cell type-sensitive research.
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Registered trials
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