A Genome-Wide Integrative Study of DNA Methylation, Gene Expression, and Later Life Hand Grip Strength

Hand grip strength (HS) measures muscular strength and associates with multiple health outcomes and mortality. Studies of epigenetic and transcriptomic markers could help elucidate the biology behind HS; markers for which monozygotic (MZ) twins are excellent study populations. We performed integrated enrichment analyses (IEA) of an epigenome-wide association analysis (EWAS) and a transcriptome-wide association analysis (TWAS) of HS in blood samples of 452 MZ twins (56-80 years of age). Unsupervised IEA were conducted by the KeyPathwayMiner algorithm, while supervised IEA were performed by the KEGG and Reactome databases. No individual CpG site or probe passed correction for multiple testing. Investigating the overlap in genes with p-values