Chronic psychosocial and financial burden accelerates 5-year telomere shortening: findings from the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults Study

Abstract

Leukocyte telomere length, a marker of immune system function, is sensitive to exposures such as psychosocial stressors and health-maintaining behaviors. Past research has determined that stress experienced in adulthood is associated with shorter telomere length, but is limited to mostly crosssectional reports. We test whether repeated reports of chronic psychosocial and financial burden is associated with telomere length change over a 5-year period (Years 15 and 20) from 969 participants in the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) Study, a longitudinal, population-based cohort, ages 18-30 at time of recruitment in 1985. We further examine whether multisystem resiliency, comprised of social connections, health-maintaining behaviors, and psychological resources, mitigates the effects of burden on telomere attrition over five years. Our results indicate that adults with high chronic burden do not show decreased telomere length over the five-year period. However, these effects do vary by level of resiliency, as regression results revealed a significant interaction between chronic burden and multisystem resiliency. For individuals with high chronic burden and low multisystem resiliency (1SD below the mean), there was a significant 5-year shortening in telomere length, whereas no significant relationships between chronic burden and attrition were evident for those at moderate and higher levels of resiliency. These effects apply similarly across the three components of resiliency. Results imply that interventions should focus on establishing strong social connections, Users may view, print, copy, and download text and data-mine the content in such documents, for the purposes of academic research, subject always to the full Conditions of use:

Association of Early-Life Adversity With Measures of Accelerated Biological Aging Among Children in China

“… 13 , 18 Short telomeres and telomere shortening rate are associated with greater disease burden and mortality and are a biomarker of the aging process that allows researchers to investigate factors potentially associated with biological aging decades before morbidity and mortality. 19 , 20 , 21 …”

Advances in research on stress and behavior: special issue, 2020

“…Of particular relevance to our hyperconnected world, in which light emitting devices are prevalent at sleep time, Walker et al document here that acute exposure to low-level light at night is sufficient to induce neurological changes and depressive-like behavior [14]. Data from the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults Study presented by Cabeza de Baca et al show that chronic psychosocial and financial burden accelerates 5-year telomere shortening [15].…”

Identification Of A Group For Research Of Telomeric Aging

“…Individual length can depend either on the hereditary characteristics of the body (there is a number of mutations of genes leading to accelerated aging) or cancer (Srinivas et al, 2020), or on the influence of lifestyle. Combined effect of a wide variety of stress factors on the length of telomeres is now one of the topics widely discussed in the scientific literature (Cabeza de Baca et al, 2019;Puterman et al, 2010). At the same time, not only the negative effect of stress on the telomere length was shown, but also the possibility of maintaining their length -or, even, in some cases, their elongation .…”