HoldsUp

Morgan Levine

Altos Labs / Yale University School of Medicine

Morgan Levine, PhD, is an assistant professor of pathology at the Yale University School of Medicine and a Founding Principal Investigator at Altos Labs. Her research centers on the science of biological aging, epigenetics, and the development of aging metrics such as the PhenoAge clock. Her published work investigates epigenetic age acceleration, blood methylation tests across physiological systems, mitochondrial function, and the effects of lifestyle interventions on biological age.

37 claims checked on air: 1 contradicted 1 overstated 32 supported 3 unverified

What they said on air - overstated

6 citing their own research

1:05:09overstatedmoderatetheir own paperMorgan Levine, PhD, on PhenoAge and the Epigenetics of Age A

A statistical method that removes technical noise reduces the test-retest variation of split samples on epigenetic clocks to a maximum difference of about one year.

"we actually developed a statistical method that completely removes all this technical noise. And I won't go into the math for people on the podcast, but basically, we can get this down to: you can split the sample, and now you're getting only about one year difference at max." (said at 1:05:09)

A 2022 study by Higgins-Chen, Levine, and colleagues introduced principal-component-based (PC) epigenetic clocks to address technical noise in DNA methylation assays. In their validation across six prominent epigenetic clocks, the PC approach significantly reduced technical noise between split-sample replicates (from discrepancies of up to 9 years down to agreement for most replicates within 1.5 years). However, the claim that the method "completely removes all" technical noise and restricts differences to "at max" about one year overstates the findings, as residual variation remains and 1.5 years reflected the range for most, but not strictly all, replicates.

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