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...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Frontiers in genetics Vol. 11; p. 630186
Main Authors: Vaiserman, Alexander, Krasnienkov, Dmytro
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Switzerland Frontiers Media S.A 21.01.2021
Subjects:
age-related telomere shortening
aging-related disease
biomarker of biological age
Genetics
leukocyte telomere length
mortality
telomerase
mortality
aging-related disease
biomarker of biological age
telomerase
leukocyte telomere length
age-related telomere shortening
ISSN:1664-8021, 1664-8021
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary: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.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
ObjectType-Review-3
content type line 23
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