Aging
Navigate
Submit an Article
COVID-19Research Paper|Volume 12, Issue 20|pp 19911—19922

Short telomeres increase the risk of severe COVID-19

Antoine Froidure1,2, Manon Mahieu3, Delphine Hoton2,4, Pierre-François Laterre2,5, Jean Cyr Yombi2,6, Sandra Koenig1, Benoit Ghaye2,7, Jean-Philippe Defour3,8, Anabelle Decottignies3
  • 1Department of Pulmonology, Cliniques Universitaires Saint-Luc, Université Catholique de Louvain, Brussels, Belgium
  • 2Institut de Recherche Expérimentale et Clinique, Université Catholique de Louvain, Brussels, Belgium
  • 3de Duve Institute, Université Catholique de Louvain, Brussels, Belgium
  • 4Department of Pathology, Cliniques Universitaires Saint-Luc, Université Catholique de Louvain, Brussels, Belgium
  • 5Department of Intensive Care, Cliniques Universitaires Saint-Luc, Université Catholique de Louvain, Brussels, Belgium
  • 6Department of Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases, Cliniques Universitaires Saint-Luc, Université Catholique de Louvain, Brussels, Belgium
  • 7Department of Radiology, Cliniques Universitaires Saint-Luc, Université Catholique de Louvain, Brussels, Belgium
  • 8Department of Laboratory Hematology, Cliniques Universitaires Saint-Luc, Université Catholique de Louvain, Brussels, Belgium
* Co-first authors
# Co-senior authors
Received: August 3, 2020Accepted: September 8, 2020Published: October 26, 2020
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.104097

Copyright: © 2020 Froidure 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 non-coding DNA sequences that protect chromosome ends and shorten with age. Short telomere length (TL) is associated with chronic diseases and immunosenescence. The main risk factor for mortality of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is older age, but outcome is very heterogeneous among individuals of the same age group. Therefore, we hypothesized that TL influences COVID-19-related outcomes.

In a prospective study, we measured TL by Flow-FISH in 70 hospitalized COVID-19 patients and compared TL distribution with our reference cohort of 491 healthy volunteers. We also correlated TL with baseline clinical and biological parameters. We stained autopsy lung tissue from six non-survivor COVID-19 patients to detect senescence-associated β-galactosidase activity, a marker of cellular aging.

We found a significantly higher proportion of patients with short telomeres (<10th percentile) in the COVID-19 patients as compared to the reference cohort (P<0.001). Short telomeres were associated with a higher risk of critical disease, defined as admission to intensive care unit (ICU) or death without ICU. TL was negatively correlated with C-reactive protein and neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio. Finally, lung tissue from patients with very short telomeres exhibit signs of senescence in structural and immune cells.

Our results suggest that TL influences the severity of the disease.