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

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Abstract

Telomeres are the protective complexes at the end of chromosomes, required for genomic stability. Little is known about predictors of attrition in young children or the relationship between parental and child patterns of telomere change. Telomere length was assessed twice over one year, at 4 and at 5 years of age, in Latino preschool children (n = 77) and their mothers (n = 70) in whole blood leukocytes. Maternal and child rates of attrition during the same time period were compared in 70 mother–child pairs. More children showed lengthened telomeres over one year compared to their mothers and very few children showed attrition (2.6 %). Approximately 31 % of children and 16 % of mothers displayed lengthening over one year while 66 % of children showed maintenance in contrast with 74 % of mothers. The strongest predictor for child telomere length change was child’s baseline telomere length (r = −0.61, p < 0.01). Maternal rate of change was associated with child rate of change (r = 0.33, p < 0.01). After controlling for child baseline telomere length, the relationship between child and maternal rate of change trended towards significance (Coeff = 0.20, 95 % CI −0.03 to 0.43; p = 0.08). We found primarily maintenance and lengthening from 4 to 5 years of age in children, with minimal telomere attrition, indicating that most of the telomere loss happens in the first 4 years, plateauing by age 4. Lastly, we found close to 10 % of the variance in rate of change in children shared by mothers. While some of this shared variance is genetic, there are likely environmental factors that need to be further identified that impact rate of telomere length change.

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Acknowledgments

This study was funded by NIH NIDDK 080825, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholars Program, the NASPGHAN Foundation, the Hellman Family Foundation and UCSF CTSI-SOS. This research was also supported by NIH/NCRR UCSF-CTSI Grant Number UL1 RR024131.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Pediatrics, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA

    Janet M. Wojcicki, Melvin B. Heyman & Deena Elwan

  2. Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA

    Stephen Shiboski

  3. Department of Biophysics and Biochemistry, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA

    Jue Lin & Elizabeth Blackburn

  4. Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA

    Elissa Epel

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  1. Janet M. Wojcicki
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  2. Stephen Shiboski
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Correspondence to Janet M. Wojcicki.

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Conflict of interest

JMW has no conflict of interest, SS has no conflict of interest, MH has no conflict of interest, DE has no conflict of interest, JL is a consultant to Telomere Diagnostics Inc., formerly Telomere Health, and owns stock in the company, and the company did not play any role in this research, EB has no conflict of interest and EE has no conflict of interest.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the UCSF IRB (Institutional Research Board) research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants in the study.

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Communicated by S. Hohmann.

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Wojcicki, J.M., Shiboski, S., Heyman, M.B. et al. Telomere length change plateaus at 4 years of age in Latino children: associations with baseline length and maternal change. Mol Genet Genomics 291, 1379–1389 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00438-016-1191-2

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