ArticleRoyal Society open science2017
A marker of biological age explains individual variation in the strength of the adult stress response.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed, 27 citations in OpenAlex.
- State-Dependent and Social Modulation of Circulating Glucocorticoids in a Nomadic Songbird, the Red Crossbill (Integrative organismal biology (Oxford, England) · 2026Article
- Ability to predict irregular periods of food depriviation improves body-weight regulation and reduces weight gain in food-insecure starlings.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Genome-wide profiles of DNA damage represent highly accurate predictors of mammalian age.Aging cell · 2024Article
- Biomarkers of aging.Science China. Life sciences · 2023Review
- Aging Hallmarks and the Role of Oxidative Stress.Antioxidants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
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- Telomere length correlates with physiological and behavioural responses of a long-lived seabird to an ecologically relevant challenge.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- A Refined Method for Studying Foraging Behaviour and Body Mass in Group-Housed European Starlings.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Article
- Age-Dependent Effects of Chronic Stress on Zebrafish Behavior and Regeneration.Frontiers in physiology · 2022Article
- Individual telomere dynamics and their links to life history in a viviparous lizard.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- When do older birds better resist stress? A study of the corticosterone stress response in snow petrels.Biology letters · 2020Article
- Article
- Dynamic DNA Methylation During Aging: A "Prophet" of Age-Related Outcomes.Frontiers in genetics · 2019Review
- Developmental history and stress responsiveness are related to response inhibition, but not judgement bias, in a cohort of European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris).Animal cognition · 2019Article
- Why are there associations between telomere length and behaviour?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Article
- Article
- A marker of biological age explains individual variation in the strength of the adult stress response.Royal Society open science · 2017Article
- A marker of biological ageing predicts adult risk preference in European starlings,Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
10 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The acute stress response functions to prioritize behavioural and physiological processes that maximize survival in the face of immediate threat. There is variation between individuals in the strength of the adult stress response that is of interest in both evolutionary biology and medicine. Age is an established source of this variation-stress responsiveness diminishes with increasing age in a range of species-but unexplained variation remains. Since individuals of the same chronological age may differ markedly in their pace of biological ageing, we asked whether biological age-measured here via erythrocyte telomere length-predicts variation in stress responsiveness in adult animals of the same chronological age. We studied two cohorts of European starlings in which we had previously manipulated the rate of biological ageing by experimentally altering the competition experienced by chicks in the fortnight following hatching. We predicted that individuals with greater developmental telomere attrition, and hence greater biological age, would show an attenuated corticosterone (CORT) response to an acute stressor when tested as adults. In both cohorts, we found that birds with greater developmental telomere attrition had lower peak CORT levels and a more negative change in CORT levels between 15 and 30 min following stress exposure. Our results, therefore, provide strong evidence that a measure of biological age explains individual variation in stress responsiveness: birds that were biologically older were less stress responsive. Our results provide a novel explanation for the phenomenon of developmental programming of the stress response: observed changes in stress physiology as a result of exposure to early-life adversity may reflect changes in ageing.
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