Volume 43 of Issue 5 | Academic psychiatry : the journal of the American Association of Directors of Psychiatric Residency Training and the Association for Academic Psychiatry
Authors: Chisolm MS, Tackett S, Insetta E, Ruble A, Wright S
Pacing and clinical electrophysiology : PACE
Authors: Cluckey A, Perino AC, Fan J, Askari M, Nasir J, Marcus GM, Baykaner T, Narayan SM, Wang PJ, Turakhia MP
Cellular and molecular life sciences : CMLS
Authors: Trivedi A, Noble-Haeusslein LJ, Levine JM, Santucci AD, Reeves TM, Phillips LL
Nature communications
Authors: Gomes MGM, Oliveira JF, Bertolde A, Ayabina D, Nguyen TA, Maciel EL, Duarte R, Nguyen BH, Shete PB, Lienhardt C
European journal of heart failure
Authors: Felker GM, Borentain M, Cleland JG, DeSouza MM, Kessler PD, O'Connor CM, Seiffert D, Teerlink JR, Voors AA, McMurray JJV
JCI insight
Authors: Ross JT, Nesseler N, Lee JW, Ware LB, Matthay MA
Breast cancer research and treatment
Authors: Melisko ME, Assefa M, Hwang J, DeLuca A, Park JW, Rugo HS
Clinical journal of the American Society of Nephrology : CJASN
Authors: Cervantes L, Mundo W, Powe NR
Circulation
Authors: Branch KR, Probstfield JL, Eikelboom JW, Bosch J, Maggioni AP, Cheng RK, Bhatt DL, Avezum A, Fox KAA, Connolly SJ, Shestakovska O, Yusuf S
Volume 6 of Issue 6 | Royal Society open science
Authors: Bateson M, Aviv A, Bendix L, Benetos A, Ben-Shlomo Y, Bojesen SE, Cooper C, Cooper R, Deary IJ, Hägg S, Harris SE, Kark JD, Kronenberg F, Kuh D, Labat C, Martin-Ruiz CM, Meyer C, Nordestgaard BG, Penninx BWJH, Pepper GV, Révész D, Said MA, Starr JM, Syddall H, Thomson WM, van der Harst P, Whooley M, von Zglinicki T, Willeit P, Zhan Y, Nettle D
Smoking is associated with shorter leucocyte telomere length (LTL), a biomarker of increased morbidity and reduced longevity. This association is widely interpreted as evidence that smoking causes accelerated LTL attrition in adulthood, but the evidence for this is inconsistent. We analysed the association between smoking and LTL dynamics in 18 longitudinal cohorts. The dataset included data from 12 579 adults (4678 current smokers and 7901 non-smokers) over a mean follow-up interval of 8.6 years. Meta-analysis confirmed a cross-sectional difference in LTL between smokers and non-smokers, with mean LTL 84.61 bp shorter in smokers (95% CI: 22.62 to 146.61). However, LTL attrition was only 0.51 bp yr faster in smokers than in non-smokers (95% CI: -2.09 to 1.08), a difference that equates to only 1.32% of the estimated age-related loss of 38.33 bp yr. Assuming a linear effect of smoking, 167 years of smoking would be required to generate the observed cross-sectional difference in LTL. Therefore, the difference in LTL between smokers and non-smokers is extremely unlikely to be explained by a linear, causal effect of smoking. Selective adoption, whereby individuals with short telomeres are more likely to start smoking, needs to be considered as a more plausible explanation for the observed pattern of telomere dynamics.
View on PubMed
