Samar Fouda
General Manager of Student Research Unit
Title: Shortening of Leukocyte Telomere Length in Patients with Posttraumatic stress disorder – A meta-analysis
Biography
Biography: Samar Fouda
Abstract
Patients experiencing Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), suffer from physical symptoms as sleeping difficulty, hormonal imbalance, and disturbance of the immune system. People with PTSD are more prone to age-related diseases and early mortality. Telomeres are regions at chromosomal ends that protect DNA from degradation. Significant shortening of Leukocyte telomere length (LTL) has been found in patients with PTSD. However, some studies showed no significant association between PTSD and LTL shortening. Hereby, we use a meta-analytic approach to synthesize evidence from published studies about the association between PTSD and LTL shortening. A computed literature search of PubMed was conducted using relevant keywords ((PTSD or psychological stress) and telomere). We selected observational studies comparing PTSD patients to non-PTSD subjects in terms of telomere length. We calculated the effect size (Cohen’s d) from regression coefficient, correlation coefficient, and mean telomere length. Data was pooled in the random effect mode of DerSimonian-Laird using a StatsDirect software. Seven studies with a total of 4456 subjects (n=547 with PTSD and n=3909 without PTSD) were included in the final analysis. The overall effect size was d=0.28 with 95% CI [-0.45 to -0.12]. Visual inspection of the forest plot revealed no significant heterogeneity. Our results showed a small but significant effect size suggesting that patients with PTSD have shorter telomere length than healthy controls. This result highlight that PTSD extends beyond physical symptoms to acceleration of cellular aging which might contribute to early mortality. Interventions to manage cellular aging in PTSD patients should be addressed in future research.