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Higher daily air temperature is associated with shorter leukocyte telomere length: KORA F3 and KORA F4

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Higher air temperature is associated with increased age-related morbidity and mortality. To date, short-term effects of air temperature on leucocyte telomere length have not been investigated in an adult population. We aimed to examine the short-term associations between air temperature and leucocyte telomere length in an adult population-based setting including two independent cohorts. This population-based study involved 5,864 participants from the KORA F3 (2004-2005) and F4 (2006-2008) cohort studies, conducted in Augsburg, Germany. Leucocyte telomere length was assessed by a quantitative PCR-based method. We estimated air temperature at each participant's residential address through a highly resolved spatiotemporal model. We conducted cohort-specific generalized additive models to explore the short-term effects of air temperature on leucocyte telomere length at lags 0-1, 2-6, 0-6, and 0-13 days separately and pooled the estimates by fixed-effects meta-analysis. Our study found that between individuals, an interquartile range (IQR) increase in daily air temperature was associated with shorter leucocyte telomere length at lags 0-1, 2-6, 0-6 and 0-13 days (%change: -2.96 [-4.46; -1.43], -2.79 [-4.49; -1.07], -4.18 [-6.08; -2.25], and -6.69 [-9.04; -4.27], respectively). This meta-analysis of two cohort studies showed that between individuals, higher daily air temperature was associated with shorter leucocyte telomere length.

Impact/Purpose

This is a manuscript detailing associations between heat exposure and telomere length. It connect heat exposure to biological aging which may underlie many health effects.

Citation

Ni, W., K. Wolf, S. Breitner, S. Zhang, N. Nikolaou, C. Ward-Caviness, M. Waldenberger, C. Gieger, A. Peters, AND A. Schneider. Higher daily air temperature is associated with shorter leukocyte telomere length: KORA F3 and KORA F4. American Chemical Society, Washington, DC, 56(24):17815-17824, (2022). [DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.2c04486]

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DOI: Higher daily air temperature is associated with shorter leukocyte telomere length: KORA F3 and KORA F4
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Last updated on August 29, 2023
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