GSEA revealed functional associations (adjusted P<0.05) of four main categories of genes (Figure 2c, Table S3): (i) REST-targets and developmental genes [23], [24] with hypermethylated age-CpGs, (ii) genes involved in hematopoiesis and lymphoid-myeloid differentiation with hypomethylated age and age-CA CpGs, (iii) genes involved in T-cell activation and natural-killer (NK) mediated cytotoxicity with hypermethylated cancer-specific CpGs, and (iv) genes involved in cell-adhesion and HOXA9 regulatory programs with hypomethylated cancer-specific CpGs. Here, HOXA9 is linked to cancer.