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American Journal of Epidemiology Advance Access published online on February 12, 2008
American Journal of Epidemiology, doi:10.1093/aje/kwm380
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American Journal of Epidemiology © 2008 The Authors This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Original Contribution

Telomere Length and Mortality: A Study of Leukocytes in Elderly Danish Twins

Masayuki Kimura1, Jacob v. B. Hjelmborg2, Jeffrey P. Gardner1, Lise Bathum2, Michael Brimacombe1, Xiaobin Lu1, Lene Christiansen2, James W. Vaupel3, Abraham Aviv1 and Kaare Christensen2

1 Center of Human Development and Aging, New Jersey Medical School, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, Newark, NJ
2 Epidemiology and Statistics Units, Institute of Public Health, Danish Twin Registry and Danish Aging Research Center, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark
3 Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany

Correspondence to Dr. Abraham Aviv, Center of Human Development and Aging, Room F-464, New Jersey Medical School, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, 185 South Orange Avenue, Newark, NJ 07103 (e-mail: avivab{at}umdnj.edu).

Received for publication October 2, 2007. Accepted for publication November 28, 2007.

Leukocyte telomere length, representing the mean length of all telomeres in leukocytes, is ostensibly a bioindicator of human aging. The authors hypothesized that shorter telomeres might forecast imminent mortality in elderly people better than leukocyte telomere length. They performed mortality analysis in 548 same-sex Danish twins (274 pairs) aged 73–94 years, of whom 204 pairs experienced the death of one or both co-twins during 9–10 years of follow-up (1997–2007). From the terminal restriction fragment length (TRFL) distribution, the authors obtained the mean TRFL (mTRFL) and the mean values of the shorter 50% (mTRFL50) and shortest 25% (mTRFL25) of TRFLs in the distribution and computed the mode of TRFL (MTRFL). They analyzed the proportions of twin pairs in which the co-twin with the shorter telomeres died first. The proportions derived from the intrapair comparisons indicated that the shorter telomeres predicted the death of the first co-twin better than the mTRFL did (mTRFL: 0.56, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.49, 0.63; mTRFL50: 0.59, 95% CI: 0.52, 0.66; mTRFL25: 0.59, 95% CI: 0.52, 0.66; MTRFL: 0.60, 95% CI: 0.53, 0.67). The telomere-mortality association was stronger in years 3–4 than in the rest of the follow-up period, and it grew stronger with increasing intrapair difference in all telomere parameters. Leukocyte telomere dynamics might help explain the boundaries of the human life span.

aged; leukocytes; mortality; survival analysis; telomere; twins

Abbreviations: CI, confidence interval; LTL, leukocyte telomere length; TRFL, terminal restriction fragment length


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