Concept study: genetic markers of biological age as study endpoints of eHealth interventions promoting lifestyle change

Mobile health (mHealth) apps can potentially support patients and health care systems (Jakob et al. 2022). Of particular interest is the application of mHealth apps to multi-component lifestyle interventions, such as diet and nutrition, physical activity, sleep and stress management behavior. Such interventions have the potential to slow down or even revert aging processes (Fiorito et al. 2021). Many clinical and laboratory biomarkers have been evaluated to document the aging process and healthy aging (Li et al. 2021). Popular markers are telomere length and epigenetic methylation clocks (Seale et al. 2022). Studies evaluating epigenetic clocks as biomarkers have yielded inconclusive results (Galow & Peleg 2022). We plan to study the effects of a mHealth intervention on epigenetic clocks as biomarkers of healthy aging. A preliminary literature search was conducted to inform the design of such an intervention.