Paternal age at birth is associated with offspring leukocyte telomere length in the nurses' health study

Abstract

what is known already: Telomere length is considered a highly heritable trait. Recent studies report a positive correlation between paternal age at birth and offspring LTL. Maternal age at birth has also been positively associated with offspring LTL, but may stem from the strong correlation with paternal age at birth. study design, size and duration: The Nurses' Health Study (NHS) is an ongoing prospective cohort study of 121 700 female registered nurses who were enrolled in 1976. Great effort goes into maintaining a high degree of follow-up among our cohort participants (.95% of potential person-years). In 1989-1990, a subset of 32 826 women provided blood samples from which we selected participants for several nested case -control studies of telomere length and incident chronic disease. We used existing LTL data on a total of 4250 disease-free women who also reported maternal and paternal age at birth for this study.participants/materials, setting and methods: Nested case-control studies of stroke, myocardial infarction, cancers of the breast, endometrium, skin, pancreas and colon, as well as colon adenoma, were conducted within the blood sub-cohort. Each study used the following study design: for each case of a disease diagnosed after blood collection, a risk-set sampling scheme was used to select from one to three controls from the remaining participants in the blood sub-cohort who were free of that disease when the case was diagnosed. Controls were matched to cases by age at blood collection (+1 year), date of blood collection (+3 months), menopausal status, recent postmenopausal hormone use at blood collection (within 3 months, except for the myocardial infarction case -control study), as well as other factors carefully chosen for each individual study. The current analysis was limited to healthy controls. We also included existing LTL data from a small random sample of women participating in a cognitive sub-study. LTL was measured using the quantitative PCR-based method. Exposure and covariate information are extracted from biennial questionnaires completed by the participants.main results and the role of chance: We found a strong association between paternal age at birth and participant LTL (P ¼ 1.6 × 10 -5 ) that remained robust after controlling for indicators of early life SES. Maternal age at birth showed a weak inverse association with participant LTL after adjusting for age at blood collection and paternal age at birth (P ¼ 0.01). We also noted a stronger association between paternal age at birth and participant LTL among premenopausal than among postmenopausal women (P interaction ¼ 0.045). However, this observation may be due to chance as premenopausal women represented only 12.6% (N ¼ 535) of the study population and LTL was not correlated with age at menopause, total or estrogen-only hormone therapy (HT) use suggesting that changes in in vivo estrogen exposure do not influence telomere length regulation.limitations and reasons for caution: The women in our study are not representative of the ge...

Leukocyte Telomere Length and All-Cause, Cardiovascular Disease, and Cancer Mortality: Results From Individual-Participant-Data Meta-Analysis of 2 Large Prospective Cohort Studies

“…From 1989 to 1990, 32,826 women provided blood samples. The details of blood collection methods have been previously described (29). The current analysis included data from 8633 women who were selected to participate in different nested case-control studies.…”

Telomere length change plateaus at 4 years of age in Latino children: associations with baseline length and maternal change

“…Older paternal age is associated with longer telomere length in children possibly explained by the longer telomeres in sperm of older fathers or epigenetic mechanisms, however, the specifics of this association are poorly understood (Hjelmborg et al 2015b). Young maternal age at conception may play a role in longer child telomere length but again the biology of these relationships including environmental versus genetic factors need to be better studied (Prescott et al 2012). Furthermore, as rate of change reflects both genetic and environmental influences, it is important to determine whether parental rate of change might covary with child rate of change.…”

The Association of Telomere Length With Family Violence and Disruption

“…37 Race was self-reported and categorized as African American (91% of the sample) or other (7%). Maternal education was classified as less than high school, high school degree, some college, and a college or associates degree or more.…”