ArticleAging and disease2025
Burn Injuries Accelerate Biological Aging and Increase the Epigenetically Inferred Risk of Mortality and Frailty.
Article in Aging and disease, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
The trial behind it
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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
- Therapeutic implications of epigenetic alterations in burns: a new frontier in burn medicine.Clinical science (London, England : 1979) · 2026Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Biological aging is closely associated with heightened disease risk, frailty, and mortality. Interestingly, physical traumas, such as burn injuries, exhibit physiological effects that resemble those of aging. However, the impact of burn injuries on biological aging remains underexplored, creating a gap in the literature that could inform better prognosis and outcomes. We conducted a prospective cohort study to investigate the effects of burn injuries on various epigenetic clocks, including HorvathAge, GrimAge, PhenoAge, and DunedinPoAm, using whole blood. The study included 59 burn patients and 25 healthy controls and was validated using a murine model of thermal injury. Our study demonstrates that burn injuries accelerate biological aging and the rate of aging, with these effects persisting for up to 28 days post-injury. The extent of biological aging was positively correlated with burn size, with severe burns resulting in an acceleration of 13-14 years in biological age as measured by GrimAge and PhenoAge-double the acceleration observed with chronic long-term smoking. This acceleration occurred irrespective of age or sex, though older patients were the most vulnerable to the aging effects of burn injuries. The role of burns as an accelerator of aging was further confirmed in mice, which exhibited the equivalent of 3-6 human years of accelerated aging (8 mouse months, or 7 human days) after the injury, reinforcing the chronic nature of the effect. Additionally, burn injuries increased epigenetically inferred risks of frailty and mortality in humans, highlighting their long-term and enduring consequences. Collectively, our findings identify burn injuries as the most significant and chronic accelerant of biological aging reported to date. To our knowledge, this study is one of the first to link burn injuries-or any form of physical trauma-to accelerated cellular and biological aging.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What Socratic holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.