SynthesisEpidemiologic reviews2013
Is socioeconomic status associated with biological aging as measured by telomere length?
Synthesis in Epidemiologic reviews, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 64 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
64 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Pooled it
- Socioeconomic Determinants of Sodium Intake in Adult Populations of High-Income Countries: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.American journal of public health · 2017Pooled it
- Telomere length and health outcomes: A two-sample genetic instrumental variables analysis.Experimental gerontology · 2016Pooled it
- Longitudinal telomere length shortening and cognitive and physical decline in later life: The Lothian Birth Cohorts 1936 and 1921.Mechanisms of ageing and development · 2016Trial
- Perinatal complications and aging indicators by midlife.Pediatrics · 2014Trial
- Telomere length and prevalent chronic lung disease in middle-aged and older adults: socioeconomic heterogeneity and early-life tobacco exposure in the health and retirement study.Frontiers in medicine · 2026Article
- Causal association of education attainment with aging and cardiac death: Evidence from Mendelian randomization analysis.Medicine · 2025Article
- Ignoring the planet: A critical blind spot for research on ageing.Journal of internal medicine · 2025Review
- Associations of family affluence with cortisol production and telomere length in European children.EBioMedicine · 2025Article
- Article
- Modeling the impact of socioeconomic disparity, biological markers and environmental exposures on phenotypic age using mediation analysis and structural equation models.International journal of medical informatics · 2025Article
- A Novel Metabolomic Aging Clock Predicting Health Outcomes and Its Genetic and Modifiable Factors.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2024Article
- Cumulative Stress Across the Life Course and Biological Aging in Adulthood.Psychosomatic medicine · 2024Article
- Does Adulthood Socioeconomic Status Predict Subsequent Telomere Length in Racially and Ethnically Diverse Women?Journal of biomedical and life sciences · 2024Article
- Telomere Length, Health, and Mortality in a Cohort of Older Black South African Adults.The journals of gerontology. Series A, Biological sciences and medical sciences · 2023Article
- The interaction of socioeconomic stress and race on telomere length in children: A systematic review and meta-analysis.SSM - population health · 2023Article
- Article
- The prevalence of menstrual disorders and premenstrual syndrome among adolescent girls living in North Borneo, Malaysia: a questionnaire-based study.BMC women's health · 2022Article
- How social/environmental determinants and inflammation affect salivary telomere length among middle-older adults in the health and retirement study.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Higher educational attainment is associated with longer telomeres in midlife: Evidence from sibling comparisons in the UK Biobank.SSM - population health · 2022Article
4 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
It has been hypothesized that one way in which lower socioeconomic status (SES) affects health is by increasing the rate of biological aging. A widely used marker of biological aging is telomere length. Telomeres are structures at the ends of chromosomes that erode with increasing cell proliferation and genetic damage. We aimed to identify, through systematic review and meta-analysis, whether lower SES (greater deprivation) is associated with shorter telomeres. Thirty-one articles, including 29 study populations, were identified. We conducted 3 meta-analyses to compare the telomere lengths of persons of high and low SES with regard to contemporaneous SES (12 study populations from 10 individual articles), education (15 study populations from 14 articles), and childhood SES (2 study populations from 2 articles). For education, there was a significant difference in telomere length between persons of high and low SES in a random-effects model (standardized mean difference (SMD) = 0.060, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.002, 0.118; P = 0.042), although a range of sensitivity analyses weakened this association. There was no evidence for an association between telomere length and contemporaneous SES (SMD = 0.104, 95% CI: -0.027, 0.236; P = 0.119) or childhood SES (SMD = -0.037, 95% CI: -0.143, 0.069; P = 0.491). These results suggest weak evidence for an association between SES (as measured by education) and biological aging (as measured by telomere length), although there was a lack of consistent findings across the SES measures investigated here.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.