Life
Beyond the Socioeconomic Gradient: The Epigenetic Coefficient (EGC) as a Distribution-Sensitive Framework for Measuring Inequality in Epigenetic Ageing
By Marigliano P, Capunzo M and Aliberti SM.
Abstract
Background/objectives
Studies of socioeconomic differences in DNA methylation-based ageing mainly report regression coefficients, group contrasts, mediation estimates, or decompositions, which do not describe how complete epigenetic age acceleration (EAA) distributions differ across ordered socioeconomic strata. We developed the Epigenetic Coefficient (EGC) to address this gap.
Methods
The study comprised two linked workstreams. First, we specified the EGC profile (EGC-M, a distributional magnitude based on weighted pairwise Wasserstein-1 distances; EGC-O, a conditional orientation; EGC-S, a rank-gradient companion; and L, the population mean burden) and verified the frozen version 1.0 point estimators through independent R (version 4.6.1) and Python (version 3.14.5) implementations, controlled datasets, and a small exploratory pilot. Second, a structured evidence map of 238 deduplicated publications was searched for equivalent methods.