Acceleration of telomere loss by chemotherapy is greater in older patients with locally advanced head and neck cancer.

Purpose: Chronic viral infection and combinations of chemotherapeutic drugs have been reported to accelerate telomere erosion. Here, we asked if chemoradiotherapy, using the single agent cisplatin, would accelerate telomere loss in head and neck cancer patients, and whether loss was linked to smoking status, age, gender, or stage of disease at diagnosis.

Experimental Design: Blood samples were collected from 20 patients with squamous cell cancer of the head and neck before, during, and after chemoradiotherapy.

Paternal age is positively linked to telomere length of children.

Telomere length is linked to age-associated diseases, with shorter telomeres in blood associated with an increased probability of mortality from infection or heart disease. Little is known about how human telomere length is regulated despite convincing data from twins that telomere length is largely heritable, uniform in various tissues during development until birth and variable between individuals. As sperm cells show increasing telomere length with age, we investigated whether age of fathers at conception correlated with telomere length of their offspring.