Research Paper Volume 15, Issue 2 pp 353—370
Placental telomere length shortening is not associated with severe preeclampsia but the gestational age
Figure 1. The lack of association between severe preeclampsia (PE) and telomere length (TL) after stratifying by gestational age. (A) Distribution of ln-transformed relative placental TL in the third trimester. Red color: severe PE samples; Blue color: control samples. (B) Severe PE is highly confounded by clinical variables. Top 10 most relevant phenotypic variables of severe PE, calculated using logistic regression. (C) Top 10 variables with the highest proportion of variance explained (PVE), per ANOVA analysis. (D) Scatter plot of TL by delivery gestational age, with red dots representing severe PE cases and blue dots representing controls. The black line represents linear regression of TL on gestational age using all samples; the red line shows the linear regression of TL on gestational age using only severe PE cases. (E) Boxplots of placenta TL of term severe PE samples (n=18) and term controls (n=133). (F) Boxplots of placenta TL of term severe PE samples (n=18) and the subset of matched term controls (n=18) stratified by gestational age (38, 39, 40+ weeks).