Tissue Specific Age Acceleration in the Sperm of Oligozoospermic Men

To determine if disease can modify aging patterns in an affected tissue without altering the aging patterns of other tissues, blood and semen of individuals with oligozoospermia (n=10) were compared to the blood and semen of individuals with normozoospermia (n=24). The Horvath and Jenkins age calculators were utilized to predict the epigenetic age of blood and sperm through the use of DNA methylation. Using these calculators, it was found that sperm of oligozoospermic men were predicted to be significantly older than the sperm of normozoospermic men; however, there was not a significant epigenetic age difference in blood. These results lead to the conclusion that tissue specific aging is occurring in sperm of oligozoospermic individuals but not in unaffected somatic tissues (in our case, blood). Whole blood samples as well as semen samples were taken from 34 men diagnosed with either oligozoospermia or normozoospermia. Epigenetic ages were then assesed in each tissue type to identify unique aging signatures between tissue types.