Telomere Shortening, a Biomarker for Aging, Is Increased by High Ambient Temperatures.
The paper I'll briefly discuss is this one: Higher Daily Air Temperature Is Associated with Shorter Leukocyte Telomere Length: KORA F3 and KORA F4 Wenli Ni, Kathrin Wolf, Susanne Breitner, Siqi Zhang, Nikolaos Nikolaou, Cavin K. Ward-Caviness, Melanie Waldenberger, Christian Gieger, Annette Peters, and Alexandra Schneider, Environmental Science & Technology 2022 56 (24), 17815-17824.
KORA is an abbreviation (in German) of "Kooperative Gesundheitsforschung in der Region Augsburg," a series of longitudinal epidemiological studies conducted in a region of Germany.
Genetic Epidemiology of Refractive Error in the KORA
Germany is a nation that has committed, albeit informally, but nonetheless in a practical sense, to make climate change accelerate, having decided to replace nuclear energy with coal.
Originally the intention was to replace nuclear energy with huge amounts of dangerous natural gas, an idea which their former Chancellor, Gerhardt Schroeder worked to promote when in office. Schroeder is now working as a salesman for Gazprom, Putin's dangerous natural gas company, but Germany rather sheepishly switched from gas to coal after their blindfolds came off to reveal they were funding a vicious war of conquest in Ukraine, a nation with which Germany already has an unhappy history.
The plan, which involves dumping dangerous fossil fuel waste directly into the environment, has left Germany with what is consistently one of the highest carbon intensities for electrical generation in Europe.
Anyway, about the paper based on the German KORA study:
The full paper is open by "authors choice," and there is no need to excerpt it extensively, but a description of what a telomere is, which is quite succinct is excerpted for convenience:
...Telomeres are highly conserved tandem repetitive nucleotide sequences (TTAGGG), which provide a protective cap at the ends of chromosome to maintain genome stability. (12,13) Telomeres are fundamental for cell division and shorten after each round of cell division. (14) Consequently, leukocyte telomere length shortening is evaluated as a potential biomarker for biologic aging, and telomere shortening has been associated with increasing numbers of age-related diseases such as stroke, cardiovascular disease, or cancer. (15?18) A recent large cohort study from the United Kingdom Biobank found that shortened leukocyte telomere length was associated with increased overall cardiovascular, respiratory, digestive, musculoskeletal, and COVID-19 mortality. (19) A further review study showed that telomere attrition was influenced by genetic and environmental factors. (12) Evidence is rapidly growing that telomere shortening can be accelerated by exposure to nonoptimal environmental factors like air pollution, (20,21) and pesticides. (22)...
The introduction continues:
...Air temperature is an important environmental factor, especially in the context of climate change. A study in the three largest English cities (Greater London, Greater Manchester, and West Midlands) found that heat and cold exposure increased the risk of mortality and years of life lost. (23) In addition, high air temperature or heat stress has been associated with higher levels of oxidative stress and inflammatory biomarkers. (24?27) As oxidative stress and inflammation can speed up telomere attrition, (28,29) these findings suggest that air temperature might affect telomere length. However, only one birth study has reported that prenatal high and low air temperature exposures were associated with shorter cord blood telomere length. (30) So far, the effect of air temperature on leukocyte telomere length has not been investigated among an adult population.
Therefore, we aimed to examine the short-term associations between air temperature and leukocyte telomere length in the region of Augsburg, Germany, within two independent adult cohorts...
A brief excerpt from the discussion of the finding:
...We found both significant immediate and lagged effects of air temperature on leukocyte telomere length at lags 0–1, 2–6, 0–6, and 0–13 days. The results indicate that high air temperatures over the preceding 2 weeks are associated with shorter telomere length. A recent epidemiological study based on 1792 participants with overweight/obesity reported a decreasing trend in leukocyte telomere length in association with increasing PM10-levels, which was observed with a lag of up to 2 weeks. (44) These findings suggest that short-term effects of environmental factors on leukocyte telomere length should also be considered as adverse effects with potential health implications. Moreover, this study indicates that the more delayed effects (lags 0–13 days: ?6.69% [?9.04%; ?4.27%]) are larger than the immediate effects (lags 0–1 days: ?2.96% [?4.46%; ?1.43%]). It is conceivable that the immediate effects on telomere length on a day-to-day basis are at least partly compensated. However, the findings of this study suggest that repeated exposure to high temperatures may have compounding effects on telomere length. The reversibility of these effects still needs to be explored, in particular, to determine if there is an exposure level or frequency at which effects become partially or totally irreversible...
Again, the full paper is open sourced. It's an interesting read.
Have a nice weekend.
