Although we cannot exclude a priori this hypothesis, it is worth to note that (1) the CpG sites cg17287034 in the ADAM12 gene and cg06679270 in the CERS3 gene showed the same DNA methylation trend in the GSE42865 dataset and in ours (we cannot check ITGA9 because the probe is missing in the Infinium450k design) (Additional file 5) and (2) ITGA9, ADAM12 and CERS3 showed gene expression changes between WS and normal fibroblasts according to the GSE48761 dataset. Here, ADAM12 is linked to Werner syndrome.