Epigenetic Clocks in Aging Research: From Computational Design to Biological Interpretation

Epigenetic clocks have become widely used tools for quantifying biological aging, evaluating health risk, and assessing intervention effects. Advances in DNA methylation profiling and machine learning have enabled increasingly accurate age prediction across tissues and populations. However, the rapid expansion of epigenetic clock applications has outpaced the development of a unified interpretive framework, leading to persistent ambiguity regarding what these models biologically represent. In particular, predictive accuracy is frequently conflated with mechanistic insight, and changes in clock outputs are often interpreted as evidence of altered aging biology without sufficient causal grounding.