Fig. 1

Participants and study design. A The globe with the highlighted spots where participants were recruited for the study. Central region is highlighted in yellow; Yakutia is highlighted in gray. B Histogram of the age distribution in the two regions. C The scheme of EWAS experiments in this study: first, epigenetic differences between regions are studied, then sex-specific differences in both regions are sought and compared between the regions. D The basic workflow that the EWAS experiments follow. It involves searching for DMPs—CpGs that are statistically different between the phenotypes in question—which are used for Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA) and comparison with lists of CpGs and genes from other works. In addition, the analysis of various biomarkers obtained from DNAm data (epigenetic ages, their derivatives, and blood cell count measures)