Research Paper|Volume 9, Issue 3|pp 687—705

Longitudinal study of surrogate aging measures during human immunodeficiency virus seroconversion

Janice M. Leung^1,^2,³, Nick Fishbane¹, Meaghan Jones⁴, Alexander Morin⁴, Stella Xu¹, Joseph CY Liu¹, Julie MacIsaac⁴, M-J Milloy³, Kanna Hayashi^3,⁵, Julio Montaner³, Steve Horvath⁶, Michael Kobor⁴, Don D. Sin^1,², P. Richard Harrigan⁴, S.F. Paul Man^1,²

¹Centre for Heart Lung Innovation, St. Paul’s Hospital, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, V6Z 1Y6, Canada
²Division of Respiratory Medicine, Department of Medicine, St. Paul’s Hospital, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, V6Z 1Y6, Canada
³BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, St. Paul’s Hospital, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, V6Z 1Y6, Canada
⁴Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, V5Z 4H4, Canada
⁵Department of Medicine, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, V6Z 1Y6, Canada
⁶Departments of Human Genetics and Biostatistics, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA

Received: January 5, 2017Accepted: February 20, 2017Published: February 23, 2017

https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.101184

Copyright: © 2017 Leung et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Persons living with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) harbor an increased risk of age-related conditions. We measured changes in telomere length and DNA methylation in the peripheral blood of 31 intravenous drug users, who were followed longitudinally with blood samples pre-HIV (T1), immediately post-HIV (T2; 1.9±1 year from T1), and at a later follow-up time (T3; 2.2±1 year from T2). Absolute telomere length measurements were performed using polymerase chain reaction methods. Methylation profiles were obtained using the Illumina Human Methylation450 platform. Methylation aging was assessed using the Horvath method. Telomere length significantly decreased between T1 and T2 (227±46 at T1 vs. 201±48 kbp/genome at T2, p=0.045), while no differences were observed between T2 and T3 (201±48 at T2 vs. 186±27 kbp/genome at T3, p=0.244). Methylation aging as measured by the age acceleration residual increased over the time course of HIV infection (p=0.035). CpG sites corresponding to PCBP2 and CSRNP1 were differentially methylated between T1 and T2 at a q-value <0.05. Telomere shortening and methylation changes can therefore be observed in the short-term period immediately following HIV seroconversion. Further studies to confirm these results in larger sample sizes and to compare these results to non-HIV and non-injection drug users are warranted.