Association Between Leukocyte Telomere Length and the Risk of Incident Atrial Fibrillation: The Framingham Heart Study
Authors
Staerk, LailaWang, Biqi
Lunetta, Kathryn L.
Helm, Robert H.
Ko, Darae
Sherer, Jason A.
Ellinor, Patrick T.
Lubitz, Steven A.
McManus, David D.
Vasan, Ramachandran S.
Benjamin, Emelia J.
Trinquart, Ludovic
UMass Chan Affiliations
Division of Cardiovascular Medicine, Department of MedicineDocument Type
Journal ArticlePublication Date
2017-11-14Keywords
agingatrial fibrillation
biomarker
epidemiology
telomere genetics
Cardiology
Cardiovascular Diseases
Epidemiology
Genetics
Physiological Processes
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Show full item recordAbstract
BACKGROUND: Advancing age is a prominent risk factor for atrial fibrillation (AF). Shorter telomere length is a biomarker of biological aging, but the link between shorter telomere length and increased risk of AF remains unclear. We examined the association between shorter leukocyte telomere length (LTL) and incident AF. METHODS AND RESULTS: We included AF-free participants from the observational Framingham Heart Study Offspring cohort from 1995 to 1998, who had LTL measurements. We examined the association between baseline LTL and incident AF with multivariable Cox models adjusted for age, sex, current smoking, height, weight, systolic and diastolic blood pressure, use of antihypertensive medication, diabetes mellitus, history of myocardial infarction, and history of heart failure. The study sample comprised 1143 AF-free participants (52.8% women), with mean age of 60+/-8 years. The mean LTL at baseline was 6.95+/-0.57 kb. During 15.1+/-4.2 years mean follow-up, 184 participants (64 women) developed AF. Chronological age was associated with increased risk of AF (hazard ratio per 10-year increase, 2.16; 95% confidence interval, 1.71-2.72). There was no significant association between LTL and incident AF (hazard ratio per 1 SD decrease LTL, 1.01; 95% confidence interval, 0.86-1.19). Our study was observational in nature; hence, we could not exclude residual confounding and we were unable to establish causal pathways. CONCLUSIONS: In our moderate-sized community-based cohort, we did not find evidence for a significant association between LTL and risk of incident AF.Source
J Am Heart Assoc. 2017 Nov 14;6(11). pii: e006541. doi: 10.1161/JAHA.117.006541. Link to article on publisher's site
DOI
10.1161/JAHA.117.006541Permanent Link to this Item
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14038/40508PubMed ID
29138179Related Resources
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Copyright 2017: The Authors. Published on behalf of the American Heart Association, Inc., by Wiley. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.Distribution License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1161/JAHA.117.006541
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Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as Copyright 2017: The Authors. Published on behalf of the American Heart Association, Inc., by Wiley. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.