Addendum: Aging by the clock and yet without a program

Addendum to: Nature Aging https://doi.org/10.1038/s43587-025-00975-2, published online 18 September 2025.

In the version of the article initially published, a relevant study (Tong, H. et al. Quantifying the stochastic component of epigenetic aging. Nat. Aging 4, 886–901 (2024)) was inadvertently omitted. In the second paragraph of the “Aging clocks: precision of stochasticity” section, the following text and citation to the new reference have now been added: “Another recent study found a major stochastic component of epigenetic clocks⁷⁰. The authors also attempted to quantify this stochastic component by simulating noise-driven diffusion from an average young methylome reference toward an average old reference and then asking how well clocks trained on these stochastic trajectories reproduce the original clocks. Interpolating between two reference states omits the inter-individual heterogeneity present in real cohorts however, which could be linked to lower performance. Consequently, interpreting the residual gap as non-stochastic may reflect this simplification of the data-generating process.” This update has been made to the HTML and PDF versions of the article.