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. 2021 Sep:27:101056.
doi: 10.1016/j.bbrep.2021.101056. Epub 2021 Jun 14.

Shorter leukocyte telomere length is associated with severity of COVID-19 infection

Gabriel Arantes Dos Santos  1 , Ruan Pimenta  1 , Nayara I Viana  1   2 , Vanessa R Guimarães  1 , Poliana Romão  1 , Patrícia Candido  1 , Juliana A de Camargo  1 , Diná M Hatanaka  3 , Paula Gs Queiroz  3 , Alexandre Teruya  3 , Katia R M Leite  1 , Victor Srougi  1   3 , Miguel Srougi  1 , Sabrina T Reis  1   3   2
Affiliations

Shorter leukocyte telomere length is associated with severity of COVID-19 infection

Gabriel Arantes Dos Santos et al. Biochem Biophys Rep. 2021 Sep.

Abstract

The infection by COVID-19 is a serious global public health problem. An efficient way to improve this disease's clinical management would be to characterize patients at higher risk of progressing to critically severe infection using prognostic biomarkers. The telomere length could be used for this purpose. Telomeres are responsible for controlling the number of maximum cell divisions. The telomere length is a biomarker of aging and several diseases. We aimed to compare leukocyte telomere length (LTL) between patients without COVID-19 and patients with different clinical severity of the infection. Were included 53 patients who underwent SARS-CoV-2 PCR divided in four groups. The first group was composed by patients with a negative diagnosis for COVID-19 (n = 12). The other three groups consisted of patients with a confirmed diagnosis of COVID-19 divided according to the severity of the disease: mild (n = 15), moderate (n = 17) and severe (n = 9). The LTL was determined by Q-PCR. The severe group had the shortest LTL, followed by the moderate group. The negative and mild groups showed no differences. There is an increase of patients with hypertension (p = 0.0099) and diabetes (p = 0.0067) in moderate and severe groups. Severe group was composed by older patients in comparison with the other three groups (p = 0.0083). Regarding sex, there was no significant difference between groups (p = 0.6279). In an ordinal regression model, only LTL and diabetes were significantly associated with disease severity. Shorter telomere length was significantly associated with the severity of COVID-19 infection, which can be useful as a biomarker or to better understand the SARS-CoV-2 pathophysiology.

Keywords: Biomarker; COVID-19; Prognostic; Telomere length.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Comparison between LTL of groups I, II, III and IV. The telomere length was normalized by a single copy gene. The y axis is in arbitrary unit. The p value is determined by Kruskal-Wallis test.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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