Bisulfite-converted DNA samples from step 1 were assessed using Infinium Human Methylation EPIC Bead Chip (Illumina, California, USA) according to the manufacturer’s instructions. Illumina Genome Studio software V.2011.1 was used to extract the raw signal intensities of each probe (without background correction or normalization). The resulting raw data were normalized (control normalization) and background corrected by the manufacturer software to generate β-values for representing methylation status of each CpG site. The data preprocessing of MethylationEPIC BeadChip was performed by R package “ChAMP” V.2.18.2, including filter and normalization.22 (link) It filtered out (1) probes with detection p value (>0.01), (2) probes with <3 beads in at least 5% of samples per probe, (3) all non-CpG probes, (4) all SNP-related probes,23 24 (link) (5) all multihit probes,25 (link) (6) cross-reactive probes cohybridizing to the sex chromosomes.23 (link) MethylationEPIC BeadChip normalization (sample normalization, using the parameter “BMIQ”), calling differentially methylated points and calling DMRs (using the parameter “Bumphunter”) were performed.