Back

Telomere shortening as a stress biomarker in children and adolescents affected by natural disasters.

Miranda, D. M.; Magalhaes, S. S.; Rosa, D. V.; De Marco, L. A.; DE PAULA, J. J.; Romano-Silva, M. A.

2021-02-23 psychiatry and clinical psychology
10.1101/2021.02.20.21252124 medRxiv
Show abstract

Natural disasters have a substantial psychosocial impact. A known biological marker of stress is telomere shortening. In this study, we tested the change in behavior symptoms and telomere length and its shortening in two-time points for about fifteen months, in populations that suffered extreme climate events, comprising flood or drought events. As expected, we observed telomere shortening in children and adolescents after a stressful situation which was directly associated with the worsening of externalizing symptoms and post-traumatic symptoms using a reliable change index. Beyond the psychosocial impact, natural events seem to affect the biology of individuals in development. These findings can help to understand vulnerabilities related to stress impact and to point target populations whose mitigation actions should be addressed in case of a disaster.

Matching journals

The top 4 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.