alt Hacker NewsThese studies control for such variables, confounding effects are easy to think of, but 9/10 times here on HN, the authors DID control and adjust for that confounder, the commenters just didn't read the methods.
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Eh, no, the vast majority of splashy headline studies that make it to HN show some associative result where causality is not established. They can not control for all possible confounding. The money sentence from the study is "semaglutide was associated with significantly reduced epigenetic aging relative to placebo across multiple generations of epigenetic clocks."
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-72861-3
It kinda seems like a bunch of markers moved randomly and some of them happened to move together: "In contrast, causality-enriched epigenetic clocks28 AdaptAge, CausAge, and DamAge exhibited directionally heterogeneous and statistically non-significant changes." That gets you a publication but I don't know that I'd bet money on follow-up study results.
I've been around research enough to be allowed to comment: "oh you sweet summer child".