@article{ref1,
title="Exposure to violence during childhood is associated with telomere erosion from 5 to 10 years of age: a longitudinal study",
journal="Molecular psychiatry",
year="2013",
author="Shalev, I. and Moffitt, Terrie E. and Sugden, K. and Williams, B. and Houts, Renate M. and Danese, A. and Mill, J. and Arseneault, L. and Caspi, Avshalom",
volume="18",
number="5",
pages="576-581",
abstract="There is increasing interest in discovering mechanisms that mediate the effects of childhood stress on late-life disease morbidity and mortality. Previous studies have suggested one potential mechanism linking stress to cellular aging, disease and mortality in humans: telomere erosion. We examined telomere erosion in relation to children's exposure to violence, a salient early-life stressor, which has known long-term consequences for well-being and is a major public-health and social-welfare problem. In the first prospective-longitudinal study with repeated telomere measurements in children while they experienced stress, we tested the hypothesis that childhood violence exposure would accelerate telomere erosion from age 5 to age 10 years. Violence was assessed as exposure to maternal domestic violence, frequent bullying victimization and physical maltreatment by an adult. Participants were 236 children (49% females; 42% with one or more violence exposures) recruited from the Environmental-Risk Longitudinal Twin Study, a nationally representative 1994-1995 birth cohort. Each child's mean relative telomere length was measured simultaneously in baseline and follow-up DNA samples, using the quantitative PCR method for T/S ratio (the ratio of telomere repeat copy numbers to single-copy gene numbers). Compared with their counterparts, the children who experienced two or more kinds of violence exposure showed significantly more telomere erosion between age-5 baseline and age-10 follow-up measurements, even after adjusting for sex, socioeconomic status and body mass index (B=-0.052, s.e.=0.021, P=0.015). This finding provides support for a mechanism linking cumulative childhood stress to telomere maintenance, observed already at a young age, with potential impact for life-long health.Molecular Psychiatry advance online publication, 24 April 2012; doi:10.1038/mp.2012.32.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="1359-4184",
doi="10.1038/mp.2012.32",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/mp.2012.32"
}