Telomere Length as a Marker of Biological Age: State-of-the-Art, Open Issues, and Future Perspectives

Telomere shortening is a well-known hallmark of both cellular senescence and organismal aging. An accelerated rate of telomere attrition is also a common feature of age-related diseases. Therefore, telomere length (TL) has been recognized for a long time as one of the best biomarkers of aging. Recen...

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Veröffentlicht in:Frontiers in genetics Jg. 11; S. 630186
Hauptverfasser: Vaiserman, Alexander, Krasnienkov, Dmytro
Format: Journal Article
Sprache:Englisch
Veröffentlicht: Switzerland Frontiers Media S.A 21.01.2021
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ISSN:1664-8021, 1664-8021
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Zusammenfassung:Telomere shortening is a well-known hallmark of both cellular senescence and organismal aging. An accelerated rate of telomere attrition is also a common feature of age-related diseases. Therefore, telomere length (TL) has been recognized for a long time as one of the best biomarkers of aging. Recent research findings, however, indicate that TL per se can only allow a rough estimate of aging rate and can hardly be regarded as a clinically important risk marker for age-related pathologies and mortality. Evidence is obtained that other indicators such as certain immune parameters, indices of epigenetic age, etc., could be stronger predictors of the health status and the risk of chronic disease. However, despite these issues and limitations, TL remains to be very informative marker in accessing the biological age when used along with other markers such as indices of homeostatic dysregulation, frailty index, epigenetic clock, etc. This review article is aimed at describing the current state of the art in the field and at discussing recent research findings and divergent viewpoints regarding the usefulness of leukocyte TL for estimating the human biological age.
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Edited by: Ilia Stambler, Independent Researcher, Tel Aviv, Israel
This article was submitted to Genetics of Aging, a section of the journal Frontiers in Genetics
Reviewed by: Idan Shalev, Pennsylvania State University (PSU), United States; Yiqiang Zhan, German Center for Neurodegeneratives, Helmholtz Association of German Research Centers (HZ), Germany
ISSN:1664-8021
1664-8021
DOI:10.3389/fgene.2020.630186