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Research Paper|Volume 9, Issue 6|pp 1537—1551

The association between telomere length and mortality in Bangladesh

Samantha G. Dean1, Chenan Zhang1,2, Jianjun Gao3, Shantanu Roy1,12, Justin Shinkle1, Mekala Sabarinathan1, Maria Argos4, Lin Tong1, Alauddin Ahmed5, Md. Tariqul Islam5, Tariqul Islam5, Muhammad Rakibuz-Zaman5, Golam Sarwar5, Hasan Shahriar5, Mahfuzar Rahman6, Md. Yunus7, Joseph H. Graziano8, Lin S. Chen1, Farzana Jasmine1, Muhammad G. Kibriya1, Habibul Ahsan1,9,10,11, Brandon L. Pierce1,9,10
  • 1Department of Public Health Sciences, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
  • 2Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA 94158, USA
  • 3Department of Psychiatry, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA
  • 4Division of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
  • 5UChicago Research Bangladesh, Dhaka, Bangladesh
  • 6Research and Evaluation Division, BRAC, Dhaka, Bangladesh
  • 7International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Dhaka, Bangladesh
  • 8Department of Environmental Health Sciences, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York, NY 10032, USA
  • 9Department of Human Genetics, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60615, USA
  • 10Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60615, USA
  • 11Department of Medicine, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60615, USA
  • 12Current address: Division of Foodborne, Waterborne, and Environmental Diseases, Center for Disease Control, Atlanta, GA 30333, USA
Received: April 26, 2017Accepted: May 23, 2017Published: June 15, 2017
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.101246

Copyright: © 2017 Dean 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

Telomeres are tandem repeat sequences at the end of chromosomes that bind proteins to protect chromosome ends. Telomeres shorten with age, and shorter leukocyte telomere length (TL) has been associated with overall mortality in numerous studies. However, this association has not been tested in populations outside of Europe and the U.S. We assessed the association between TL and subsequent mortality using data on 744 mortality cases and 761 age-/sex-matched controls sampled from >27,000 participants from three longitudinal Bangladeshi cohorts: Health Effects of Arsenic Longitudinal Study (HEALS), HEALS Expansion (HEALS-E), and Bangladesh Vitamin E and Selenium Trial (BEST). We used conditional logistic regression to estimate odds ratios (ORs) for the association between a standardized TL variable and overall mortality, as well as mortality from chronic diseases, respiratory diseases, circulatory diseases, and cancer. In HEALS and BEST, we observed an association between shorter TL and increased overall mortality (P=0.03 and P=0.03), mortality from chronic disease (P=0.01 and P=0.03) and mortality from circulatory disease (P=0.03 and P=0.04). Results from pooled analyses of all cohorts were consistent with HEALS and BEST. This is the first study demonstrating an association between short TL and increased mortality in a population of non-European ancestry.