American Journal of Epidemiology Advance Access originally published online on December 4, 2008
American Journal of Epidemiology 2009 169(3):323-329; doi:10.1093/aje/kwn338
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ORIGINAL CONTRIBUTIONS |
Leukocyte Telomere Dynamics: Longitudinal Findings Among Young Adults in the Bogalusa Heart Study
Correspondence to Prof. Abraham Aviv, The Center of Human Development and Aging, Room F-464, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, New Jersey Medical School, 185 South Orange Avenue, Newark, NJ 07103 (e-mail: avivab{at}umdnj.edu).
Received for publication April 30, 2008. Accepted for publication September 22, 2008.
Leukocyte telomere length (LTL) is ostensibly a biomarker of human aging. Cross-sectional analyses have found that LTL is relatively short in a host of aging-related diseases. These studies have also provided indirect estimates of age-dependent LTL shortening. In this paper, the authors report findings of the first comprehensive longitudinal study of 450 whites and 185 African Americans in Louisiana (aged 31.4 and 37.4 years at baseline (1995–1996) and follow-up (2001–2006) examinations, respectively) participating in the Bogalusa Heart Study. Rate of change in LTL was highly variable among individuals, with some displaying a paradoxical gain in LTL during the follow-up period. The most striking observation was that age-dependent LTL shortening was proportional to LTL at baseline examination. At both baseline and follow-up examinations, African Americans had longer LTLs than whites, and smokers had shorter LTLs than nonsmokers. The longer LTL in African Americans than in whites explained in part the faster rate of LTL shortening observed among African Americans. These findings underscore the complexity of leukocyte telomere dynamics in vivo and suggest that determinants in addition to the "end-replication problem" contribute to telomere shortening in vivo.
aging; body mass index; leukocytes; oxidative stress; smoking; telomere
Abbreviations: BMI, body mass index; bp, base pairs; LTL, leukocyte telomere length
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