Abstract
Background
Cigarette smoking is associated with shorter telomere lengths in adults, but evidence on the effect of prenatal tobacco exposure is limited. We aimed to investigate the association between prenatal second-hand smoke exposure and newborn telomere length.
Methods
We recruited 762 mother–newborn pairs from Wuhan Children’s Hospital (Wuhan Maternal and Child Healthcare Hospital) between November 2013 and March 2015. Information on second-hand smoke exposure was obtained via questionnaires. Relative telomere length was measured in DNA extracted from umbilical cord blood. We used linear regression to assess the associations between prenatal second-hand smoke exposure and newborn telomere length.
Results
In the fully adjusted model, prenatal second-hand smoke exposure was associated with 9.7% shorter newborn telomere length (percent difference: −9.7%; 95% confidence interval (CI): −15.0, −4.0). The estimate for boys was lower (percent difference: −10.9%; 95% CI: −18.6, −2.5) than that for girls (percent difference: −8.5%; 95% CI: −15.8, −0.5), but the interaction term between newborn sex and prenatal second-hand smoke was not significant (P = 0.751).
Conclusions
This study demonstrated that prenatal second-hand smoke exposure may be a preventable risk factor for accelerated biological aging in the intrauterine stage, and further suggested possible sex differences in the susceptibility to prenatal second-hand smoke.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Hubei Province Health and Family Planning Scientific Research Project (grant number WJ2017Z001) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant numbers 81273083, 91643207).
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B.L. contributed to conception and design of the study, analysis and interpretation of data, and writing and revising the manuscript. L.S. contributed to collecting and analyzing data and revising the manuscript. L.Z., L.W., M.W., Z.C., B.Z., C.X., Y.L., W.X. and S.X. contributed to data collection and manuscript revising. Y.W. contributed to design of the study and revising the manuscript. All authors approved this manuscript to be published and agreed to be accountable for all aspects of this work.
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Liu, B., Song, L., Zhang, L. et al. Prenatal second-hand smoke exposure and newborn telomere length. Pediatr Res 87, 1081–1085 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41390-019-0594-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41390-019-0594-2
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