Earthquake Experience at Different Trimesters during Pregnancy Is Associated with Leukocyte Telomere Length and Long-term Health in Adulthood

Abstract

Leukocyte telomere length (LTL) is a predictor of age-related diseases, cancer, and even early mortality. Prenatal stress experience has been suggested to associate with short LTL and an increased disease risk in adult life. The present study aimed to evaluate the 39-year effects of prenatal earthquake stress (PES) exposure on LTL and increased age-related disease risk in adulthood. Here, we compared the LTL in the subjects who were exposed to PES to healthy controls (CN) and evaluated whether stress exposure at different times during pregnancy is associated with a shorter LTL and long-term health conditions in adulthood. LTL was measured in 100 adults who experienced the 1976 7.8 Richter scale Tangshan earthquake of the Hebei province in utero and divided them into first, second, and third trimester groups according to the exposure timing during pregnancy. A total of 80 healthy volunteers from Shijiazhuang of the Hebei province were also assessed for their LTL. The telomere-to-single copy gene (T/S) ratio of the PES group (0.78 ± 0.06, p = 0.04) showed a significantly lower LTL than the CN group (0.97 ± 0.08). The results of the LTL analysis indicated that the subjects who experienced PES in the second (0.69 ± 0.09, p = 0.04) or third trimester (0.67 ± 0.76, p = 0.02) showed significantly shorter LTLs compared with those in the first trimester group (0.99 ± 0.12). A fully adjusted regression model indicated the same conclusions. In addition, we found that systolic pressure (SBP; 129.32 ± 14.86 mmHg, p = 0.041), body mass index (BMI; 22.54 ± 2.71, p = 0.046), and low-density lipoprotein (LDL; 3.09 ± 0.98 mmol/L, p = 0.048) in the subjects with PES were significantly higher than those measurements in the CN subjects (SBP; 122.06 ± 10.55 mmHg; BMI; 20.24 ± 2.13; LDL; 2.91 ± 0.76 mmol/L), and there was a significant negative correlation between an increased adult hypertension risk and a shorter LTL.

Impact on pregnancy outcomes of exposure to military stress during the first or second trimester as compared with the third trimester

“…This tendency was associated with a higher rate of macrosomia among this population. Notably, along the same line, Wang et al . found that women exposed to prenatal earthquake stress in the mid‐to‐late period of pregnancy had significantly shorter leukocyte telomere length, a factor related to age‐related diseases such as cancer and early mortality, as compared with women exposed in the early period of pregnancy.…”

Systematic review and meta-analysis on the relationship between prenatal stress and metabolic syndrome intermediate phenotypes

“…Table SI 11.3 shows data collected on the relationship between PS and offspring's glucose metabolism. Four studies on offspring's glucose and PS were identified in our review and all of them found no association between glucose and PS (negative life events, job strain and exposure to earthquake) [41,47,54,55]. We found only one study reporting on PS and insulin without significant assoaciations [41].…”

“…Two separate studies described the relationship between maternal exposure to earthquake during pregnancy (as a surrogate for PS) and blood pressure later in adult life. In one study, the systolic pressure was significantly higher in the prenatal earthquake stress group compared to that in the control group, but no significant differences were found for diastolic pressure [55]. In the other study, prenatal exposure to the earthquake was not associated with systolic or diastolic blood pressure [47].…”

“…1. Full text review yielded 24 publications for inclusion into the systematic review and meta-analyses [35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58]. The list of excluded studies with reasons for exclusion is available in SI 5.…”

“…We performed two separate meta-analyses for BMI and body fat datasets. Table 1 altogether with SI 6 illustrate the characteristics of the 19 included studies [35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,53,55,56,58]. Thirteen studies included a relatively similar amount of males and females.…”