ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2019
Intergenerational effects on offspring telomere length: interactions among maternal age, stress exposure and offspring sex.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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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.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 61 citations in OpenAlex.
- Parental Age Effects on Offspring Telomere Length Across Vertebrates: A Meta-Analysis.Molecular ecology · 2026Pooled it
- Redox-Genomic Crosstalk: Linking Oxidative Stress, Sperm DNA Fragmentation, and Epigenetics in Personalized Management of Male Infertility.Journal of personalized medicine · 2026Review
- Assortative breeding experiment in a songbird suggests telomere length is determined during early life rather than at conception.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Prenatal irisin is inversely related to the term placental telomere length.BMC research notes · 2025Article
- Hidden Causes of Variation in Offspring Reproductive Value: Negative Effects of Maternal Breeding Age on Offspring Telomere Length Persist Undiminished Across Multiple Generations.Ecology letters · 2025Article
- Association Between Prenatal Exposure to Organochlorine Pesticides and Telomere Length in Neonatal Cord Blood.Toxics · 2024Article
- Reproductive aging weakens offspring survival and constrains the telomerase response to herpesvirus in Pacific oysters.Science advances · 2024Article
- Linking telomere dynamics to evolution, life history and environmental change: perspectives, predictions and problems.Biogerontology · 2024Review
- Early-life telomere length predicts life-history strategy and reproductive senescence in a threatened wild songbird.Molecular ecology · 2023Article
- Does pre-spawning catch and release angling affect offspring telomere dynamics in Atlantic salmon?Conservation physiology · 2023Article
- Stressors interact across generations to influence offspring telomeres and survival.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Evidence of Paternal Effects on Telomere Length Increases in Early Life.Frontiers in genetics · 2022Article
- Longitudinal evidence that older parents produce offspring with longer telomeres in a wild social bird.Biology letters · 2021Article
- Article
- Maternal predator-exposure affects offspring size at birth but not telomere length in a live-bearing fish.Ecology and evolution · 2020Article
- Ancestral childhood environmental exposures occurring to the grandparents and great-grandparents of the ALSPAC study children.Wellcome open research · 2020Article
- The deteriorating soma and the indispensable germline: gamete senescence and offspring fitness.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Intergenerational effects on offspring telomere length: interactions among maternal age, stress exposure and offspring sex.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Long-term fitness effects of the early-life environment in a wild bird population.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Offspring produced by older parents often have reduced longevity, termed the Lansing effect. Because adults usually have similar-aged mates, it is difficult to separate effects of maternal and paternal age, and environmental circumstances are also likely to influence offspring outcomes. The mechanisms underlying the Lansing effect are poorly understood. Variation in telomere length and loss, particularly in early life, is linked to longevity in many vertebrates, and therefore changes in offspring telomere dynamics could be very important in this context. We examined the effect of maternal age and environment on offspring telomere length in zebra finches. We kept mothers under either control (ad libitum food) or more challenging (unpredictable food) circumstances and experimentally minimized paternal age and mate choice effects. Irrespective of the maternal environment, there was a substantial negative effect of maternal age on offspring telomere length, evident in longitudinal and cross-sectional comparisons (average of 39% shorter). Furthermore, in young mothers, sons reared by challenged mothers had significantly shorter telomere lengths than sons reared by control mothers. This effect disappeared when the mothers were old, and was absent in daughters. These findings highlight the importance of telomere dynamics as inter-generational mediators of the evolutionary processes determining optimal age-specific reproductive effort and sex allocation.
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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.