A growing body of work has found correlations between selenium deficiency and suggestions of accelerated aging: increased epigenetic age, increased mortality, increased incidence of age-related disease. Selenium is incorporated into a range of proteins called selenoproteins, and it is possible to argue that too little selenium, leading to a lower production of these proteins, impairs functions relevant to aging, such as antioxidant capacity and immune system activities. As is usually the case in these matters, there is correlation and inference, but no concrete data on which of these proteins and mechanisms are more versus less important.
In this study, we analyzed the association between serum biomarkers, namely total serum selenium, selenoprotein P (SELENOP), the selenocysteine-containing glutathione peroxidase 3 (GPx3), and biological age measured by epigenetic clocks in 865 participants of the observational Berlin Aging Study II. Lower values in all three selenium biomarkers were associated with an increased pace of aging measured with the DunedinPACE clock. Our analyses do not allow to draw any conclusions on cause-effect relationships between selenium levels and accelerated biological aging. However, our results corroborate recent findings on aging phenotypes assessed by other clinical and phenotypic outcomes that show an association between selenium biomarkers and mortality.
In a recent prospective study with ~17 years of follow-up, serum concentrations of the selenium transporter SELENOP were inversely associated with all-cause and cardiovascular mortality, independent of biologically relevant confounders. In line with this finding, serum selenium was inversely associated with mortality and incident heart failure in the Dutch PREVEND study comprising ~6000 individuals. Similar results were observed in other recent large prospective European studies for all-cause mortality as well as cardiovascular outcomes. Besides all-cause mortality and cardiovascular outcomes, serum selenium biomarkers were shown to be inversely associated with prognosis in several cancer entities. Moreover, an effect of selenium levels on epigenetic age is also biologically plausible since changes in the methylome in dependence to the selenium levels in rodents, cell-lines (human, mouse) and human tissue are well established.
Link: https://doi.org/10.1186/s13148-025-01863-7
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