Mingwei Chen
Shaanxi Normal University, China.
Title: Association of relative telomere length with risk of stroke in a Chinese Han population
Biography:
He is working as research assistant in Department of Internal Medicine, Shaanxi Normal University Hospital, China.
Abstract:
Accumulating evidence indicates that telomere length, a reliable biomarker of genomic instability, is associated with increased risk of vascular diseases. However, to date, studies of association between stroke risk and relative telomere length (RTL) have demonstrated with inconsistent results. RTL of leukocytes from 300 stroke cases and 300 healthy controls in a Chinese Han population was measured using a quantitative PCR-based method in a case-control study. An unconditional multivariate regression analysis adjusted for age and sex was performed. The results indicate that stroke patients have notably shorter median RTL than healthy controls (0.4631 vs 0.7663;P<0.001). After adjusting for age and sex, multivariate logistic regression analysis showed that there was a linear association between RTL and stroke patients (P<0001). Compared with individuals in the first tertile of RTL, the odds ratios (ORs) and its 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for participants in the second and third tertiles were16.267(7.716-34.292) and 30.631(14.271-65.746), respectively. Stratified analysis showed that age and sex had no impact on the association between RTL and stroke risk except for a P value(P <0.101) in the female participants. Our study confirms that shorter RTL is associated with an increased risk of stroke in a Chinese Han population.