ArticleInternational journal of epidemiology2015
Reproducibility of telomere length assessment: an international collaborative study.
Article in International journal of epidemiology, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 101 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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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.
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Who cites it
101 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 185 citations in OpenAlex.
- Adverse childhood experiences, epigenetics and telomere length variation in childhood and beyond: a systematic review of the literature.European child & adolescent psychiatry · 2020Pooled it
- Biological aging in childhood and adolescence following experiences of threat and deprivation: A systematic review and meta-analysis.Psychological bulletin · 2020Pooled it
- Cigarette smoking and telomere length: A systematic review of 84 studies and meta-analysis.Environmental research · 2017Pooled it
- The Effects of a Remote-based Weight Loss Program on Adipocytokines, Metabolic Markers, and Telomere Length in Breast Cancer Survivors: the POWER-Remote Trial.Clinical cancer research : an official journal of the American Association for Cancer Research · 2020Trial
- Best practices for using biological data in psychological research.Journal of mood and anxiety disorders · 2026Review
- Myocardial fibrosis and viability: the role of imaging and biomarkers in patients with chronic total occlusion on coronary angiography.Biochemia medica · 2026Review
- TARPON-A Telomere Analysis and Research Pipeline Optimized for Nanopore.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- TelOMpy enables single-molecule resolution of telomere length from optical genome mapping data.BMC biology · 2025Article
- How sample handling distorts telomere studies.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Viewpoint: Pre- and post-lung transplant considerations for patients with ultra-short telomere length.The European respiratory journal · 2025Article
- Predicting brain age for veterans with traumatic brain injuries and healthy controls: an exploratory analysis.Frontiers in aging neuroscience · 2025Article
- Hematological complications in solid organ transplant recipients with telomere biology disorders: a narrative review.Frontiers in immunology · 2025Review
- Methods for telomere length measurement: an update on current technologies and emerging approaches.Frontiers in molecular biosciences · 2025Review
- Telomere length as a biomarker for cerebrovascular diseases: current evidence.Molecular biology reports · 2024Review
- High-throughput single telomere analysis using DNA microarray and fluorescent in situ hybridization.Nucleic acids research · 2024Article
- The prognostic value of serum α-klotho in age-related diseases among the US population: A prospective population-based cohort study.Preventive medicine reports · 2024Article
- Metabolic signatures of combined exercise and fasting: an expanded perspective on previous telomere length findings.Frontiers in aging · 2024Article
- Hallmarks of ageing in human skeletal muscle and implications for understanding the pathophysiology of sarcopenia in women and men.Clinical science (London, England : 1979) · 2023Article
- Associations between the New DNA-Methylation-Based Telomere Length Estimator, the Mediterranean Diet and Genetics in a Spanish Population at High Cardiovascular Risk.Antioxidants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Article
41 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
22 authors at 14 institutions in 7 countries.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundTelomere length is a putative biomarker of ageing, morbidity and mortality. Its application is hampered by lack of widely applicable reference ranges and uncertainty regarding the present limits of measurement reproducibility within and between laboratories.
methodsWe instigated an international collaborative study of telomere length assessment: 10 different laboratories, employing 3 different techniques [Southern blotting, single telomere length analysis (STELA) and real-time quantitative PCR (qPCR)] performed two rounds of fully blinded measurements on 10 human DNA samples per round to enable unbiased assessment of intra- and inter-batch variation between laboratories and techniques.
resultsAbsolute results from different laboratories differed widely and could thus not be compared directly, but rankings of relative telomere lengths were highly correlated (correlation coefficients of 0.63-0.99). Intra-technique correlations were similar for Southern blotting and qPCR and were stronger than inter-technique ones. However, inter-laboratory coefficients of variation (CVs) averaged about 10% for Southern blotting and STELA and more than 20% for qPCR. This difference was compensated for by a higher dynamic range for the qPCR method as shown by equal variance after z-scoring. Technical variation per laboratory, measured as median of intra- and inter-batch CVs, ranged from 1.4% to 9.5%, with differences between laboratories only marginally significant (P = 0.06). Gel-based and PCR-based techniques were not different in accuracy.
conclusionsIntra- and inter-laboratory technical variation severely limits the usefulness of data pooling and excludes sharing of reference ranges between laboratories. We propose to establish a common set of physical telomere length standards to improve comparability of telomere length estimates between laboratories.
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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.