Research Paper|Volume 13, Issue 2|pp 1686—1691

Shorter telomeres in children with severe asthma, an indicative of accelerated aging

Florencia M. Barbé-Tuana^1,², Lucas K. Grun^1,^3,⁴, Vinícius Pierdoná^1,⁵, Mariana M. Parisi⁶, Frederico Friedrich^3,⁴, Fátima T.C.R. Guma⁵, Leonardo A. Pinto^3,⁴, Renato T. Stein^3,⁴, Paulo M.C. Pitrez⁷, Marcus H. Jones^3,⁴

¹Group of Inflammation and Cellular Senescence, Laboratory of Immunobiology, School of Health, Sciences and Life, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), Porto Alegre, Brazil
²Postgraduate Program in Cellular and Molecular Biology, School of Health, Sciences and Life, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), Porto Alegre, Brazil
³Postgraduate Program in Pediatrics and Child Health, School of Medicine, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), Porto Alegre, Brazil
⁴Laboratory of Respiratory Physiology, Infant Center, School of Medicine, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), Porto Alegre, Brazil
⁵Postgraduate Program in Biological Sciences, Biochemistry, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Porto Alegre, Brazil
⁶Group of Comprehensive Health Care, Centre for Health and Rural Sciences, University of Cruz Alta, Cruz Alta, Brazil
⁷Pediatric Pulmonology Division, Hospital Moinhos de Vento, Porto Alegre, Brazil

Received: October 1, 2020Accepted: December 23, 2020Published: January 20, 2021

https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.202527

Copyright: © 2021 Barbé-Tuana 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

Severe therapy-resistant asthma (STRA) is closely associated with distinct clinical and inflammatory pheno-endotypes, which may contribute to the development of age-related comorbidities. Evidence has demonstrated a contribution of accelerated telomere shortening on the poor prognosis of respiratory diseases in adults. Eotaxin-1 (CCL11) is an important chemokine for eosinophilic recruitment and the progression of asthma. In the last years has also been proposed as an age-promoting factor. This study aimed to investigate the association of relative telomere length (rTL) and eotaxin-1 in asthmatic children. Children aged 8-14 years (n=267) were classified as healthy control (HC, n=126), mild asthma (MA, n=124) or severe therapy-resistant asthma (STRA, n=17). rTL was performed by qPCR from peripheral blood. Eotaxin-1 was quantified by ELISA from fresh-frozen plasma. STRA had shorter telomeres compared to HC (p=0.02) and MA (p=0.006). Eotaxin-1 levels were up-regulated in STRA [median; IQR25-75)] [(1,190 pg/mL; 108–2,510)] compared to MA [(638 pg/mL; 134–1,460)] (p=0.03) or HC [(627 pg/mL; 108–1,750)] (p<0.01). Additionally, shorter telomeres were inversely correlated with eotaxin-1 levels in STRA (r=-0.6, p=0.013). Our results suggest that short telomeres and up-regulated eotaxin-1, features of accelerated aging, could prematurely contribute to a senescent phenotype increasing the risk for early development of age-related diseases in asthma.