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Research Paper|Volume 6, Issue 5|pp 380—389

Short leukocyte telomere length is associated with obesity in American Indians: The strong heart family study

Shufeng Chen1,2, Fawn Yeh3, Jue Lin4, Tet Matsuguchi4, Elizabeth Blackburn4, Elisa T. Lee3, Barbara V. Howard5, Jinying Zhao1
  • 1Department of Epidemiology, School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA 70112, USA
  • 2Department of Evidence Based Medicine and Division of Population Genetics, State Key Laboratory of Cardiovascular Disease, Cardiovascular Institute and Fuwai Hospital, National Center for Cardiovascular Diseases, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Peking Union Medical College, Beijing, China
  • 3Center for American Indian Health Research, University of Oklahoma Health Science Center, Oklahoma City, OK 73104, USA
  • 4Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, University of California, San Francisco, CA 94143, USA
  • 5MedStar Health Research Institute, Hyattsville, MD 20782, and Georgetown/Howard Universities Center for Clinical and Translational Science, Washington, DC 20007, USA
Received: April 14, 2014Accepted: May 10, 2014Published: May 15, 2014
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.100664

Copyright: © 2014 Chen et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Shorter leukocyte telomere length (LTL) has been associated with a wide range of age-related disorders including cardiovascular disease (CVD) and diabetes. Obesity is an important risk factor for CVD and diabetes. The association of LTL with obesity is not well understood. This study for the first time examines the association of LTL with obesity indices including body mass index, waist circumference, percent body fat, waist-to-hip ratio, and waist-to-height ratio in 3,256 American Indians (14-93 years old, 60% women) participating in the Strong Heart Family Study. Association of LTL with each adiposity index was examined using multivariate generalized linear mixed model, adjusting for chronological age, sex, study center, education, lifestyle (smoking, alcohol consumption, and total energy intake), high-sensitivity C-reactive protein, hypertension and diabetes. Results show that obese participants had significantly shorter LTL than non-obese individuals (age-adjusted P=0.0002). Multivariate analyses demonstrate that LTL was significantly and inversely associated with all of the studied obesity parameters. Our results may shed light on the potential role of biological aging in pathogenesis of obesity and its comorbidities.