’ s response to reviews Title : Intrinsic and Extrinsic Epigenetic Age Acceleration are associated with Hypertensive Target Organ Damage in Older African Americans

“These measures may act as subclinical biomarkers for damage to the kidney, heart, and peripheral vasculature; however more research is needed to determine whether these relationships remain independent of lifestyle factors and comorbidities.” (p.3) Discussion “Further, the majority of these findings were attenuated after adjusting for BMI, diabetes, and smoking, indicating that the associations between epigenetic age and target organ damage should be considered suggestive. [...] . However, further research is needed to determine whether these relationships remain independent of lifestyle factors and comorbidities.” (pp.17-18) “However, most of these associations were attenuated after adjusting for blood pressure levels, BMI, diabetes, and smoking. Further research is needed to determine whether epigenetic age acceleration may have potential clinical utility in helping to quantify risk of target organ damage across organ systems.” (pp.23-24) We would also like to note that the first two paragraphs describing the associations between IEAA/EEAA and target organ damage do, in fact, discuss the results from all three Models (1-3). We did notice one omission, the discussion of Model 3 attenuation with respect to LVMI, which has now been added. 6) Why do the authors not adjust for education/SES? We agree with the Reviewer that education/SES could be a potential confounder in the analysis. We performed a sensitivity analysis by adding education (< high school, high school, college or above) as a covariate in Models 1-3, and results are shown in Table S4. We have added this sensitivity analysis to the manuscript, as follows, and presented the relevant results in the supplementary materials.