Research Paper Volume 14, Issue 2 pp 660—677
Comparing qPCR and DNA methylation-based measurements of telomere length in a high-risk pediatric cohort
- 1 Department of Biobehavioral Health, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA
- 2 Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Corporate Member of Freie Universität Berlin and Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Institute of Medical Psychology, Berlin, Germany
- 3 Department of Human Development and Family Studies, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA
- 4 The Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention Research Center, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA
- 5 Department of Pediatrics, The Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine, Hershey, PA 17033, USA
Received: October 18, 2021 Accepted: January 17, 2022 Published: January 24, 2022
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.203849How to Cite
Copyright: © 2022 Hastings et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Various approaches exist to assess population differences in biological aging. Telomere length (TL) is one such measure, and is associated with disease, disability and early mortality. Yet, issues surrounding precision and reproducibility are a concern for TL measurement. An alternative method to estimate TL using DNA methylation (DNAmTL) was recently developed. Although DNAmTL has been characterized in adult and elderly cohorts, its utility in pediatric populations remains unknown. We examined the comparability of leukocyte TL measurements generated using qPCR (absolute TL; aTL) to those estimated using DNAmTL in a high-risk pediatric cohort (N = 269; age: 8–13 years, 83% investigated for maltreatment). aTL and DNAmTL measurements were correlated with one another (r = 0.20, p = 0.001), but exhibited poor measurement agreement and were significantly different in paired-sample t-tests (Cohen’s d = 0.77, p < 0.001). Shorter DNAmTL was associated with older age (r = −0.25, p < 0.001), male sex (β = −0.27, p = 0.029), and White race (β = −0.74, p = 0.008). By contrast, aTL was less strongly associated with age (r = −0.13, p = 0.040), was longer in males (β = 0.31, p = 0.012), and was not associated with race (p = 0.820). These findings highlight strengths and limitations of high-throughput measures of TL; although DNAmTL replicated hypothesized associations, aTL measurements were positively skewed and did not replicate associations with external validity measures. These results also extend previous research in adults and suggest that DNAmTL is a sensitive TL measure for use in pediatric populations.