Higher daily air temperature is associated with shorter leukocyte telomere length: KORA F3 and KORA F4
Citation:
Ni, W., K. Wolf, S. Breitner, S. Zhang, N. Nikolaou, C. Ward-Caviness, M. Waldenberger, C. Gieger, A. Peters, AND A. Schneider. Higher daily air temperature is associated with shorter leukocyte telomere length: KORA F3 and KORA F4. ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY. American Chemical Society, Washington, DC, 56(24):17815-17824, (2022). https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.2c04486
Impact/Purpose:
This is a manuscript detailing associations between heat exposure and telomere length. It connect heat exposure to biological aging which may underlie many health effects.
Description:
Higher air temperature is associated with increased age-related morbidity and mortality. To date, short-term effects of air temperature on leucocyte telomere length have not been investigated in an adult population. We aimed to examine the short-term associations between air temperature and leucocyte telomere length in an adult population-based setting including two independent cohorts. This population-based study involved 5,864 participants from the KORA F3 (2004-2005) and F4 (2006-2008) cohort studies, conducted in Augsburg, Germany. Leucocyte telomere length was assessed by a quantitative PCR-based method. We estimated air temperature at each participant's residential address through a highly resolved spatiotemporal model. We conducted cohort-specific generalized additive models to explore the short-term effects of air temperature on leucocyte telomere length at lags 0-1, 2-6, 0-6, and 0-13 days separately and pooled the estimates by fixed-effects meta-analysis. Our study found that between individuals, an interquartile range (IQR) increase in daily air temperature was associated with shorter leucocyte telomere length at lags 0-1, 2-6, 0-6 and 0-13 days (%change: -2.96 [-4.46; -1.43], -2.79 [-4.49; -1.07], -4.18 [-6.08; -2.25], and -6.69 [-9.04; -4.27], respectively). This meta-analysis of two cohort studies showed that between individuals, higher daily air temperature was associated with shorter leucocyte telomere length.
URLs/Downloads:
DOI: Higher daily air temperature is associated with shorter leukocyte telomere length: KORA F3 and KORA F4