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The association of individual changes in stressful life events and telomere length over time in twins aged 50 years and above.

OBJECTIVE
Exposure to adverse stressors has been associated with shortening of leukocyte telomere length( LTL). The present longitudinal study investigates the time course of exposure to life events and LTL to determine whether increases in exposure to life events are related to subsequent accelerated LTL shortening.


METHODS
In the Swedish Adoption Twin Study of Aging (SATSA) we assessed late-life stressful events and LTL in 543 individual participants (mean age 68.4 and 40% men, including 48 complete monozygotic twin pairs and 167 complete dizygotic twin pairs) in up to 5 separate measurements over a period of 25 years. LTL was measured using qPCR. Longitudinal analyses were conducted using time-varying mixed modeling, corrected for lifestyle factors and depressive symptoms.


RESULTS
When adjusting for differences in genetic makeup by looking only in monozygotic twins, we found that an increase in life stressors within an individual was related to decreased LTL over time (B=-0,02; 95%CI=-0,04 to 0,01; p=0,002). None of the findings were significant when only looking at dizygotic twins (all p values > 0.05).


CONCLUSION
Our findings in an older population show a causal relation between increase in life stress on accelerated LTL shortening by using intra-individual time-varying analysis.