Associação entre comprimento telomérico leucocitário e sintomas depressivos em idosos da comunidade

Abstract

The increasing population aging is a global reality and it is followed by chronic diseases that sway older people’s life quality. Amongst the amendments related to greying, the telomeric length stands out as an important cell marker of aging. Telomeres are nucleoprotein structures situated at the ends of chromosomes, which have the function of capping the edge of chromosomes, preventing chromosomal fusions and damage to their ends. With each cell division in regular cells, there’s a natural decrease of telomeres, leading to a cell senescence and cell harms, which is related to physiological aging and it may be related to several health conditions, including moods upheavals. Amid these upheavals, the depressive symptoms stands out. It is a frequently disorder in older people, and it may speed up the aging process. The study had the goal to look into the ratio between leukocyte telomere length and depressive symptoms on older people from the commonwealth. It’s an observational and cross-sectional study, with the sample of a population-based study, made with older people in the commonwealth. The sample was appraised with interviews, with a clinic sociodemographic questionnaire, depressive symptoms by the EDG (Scale of Geriatric Depression), it was also collected blood samples to which was extracted and measured the telomere length by quantitative chain reactions of the polymerase. The sample was typified with a descriptive analysis and data normality, verified using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. The association between telomere length and depressive symptoms was investigated by logistic regression analysis. These analysis were held on the SPSS software (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) version 23.0, using Microsoft Windows and it was considered the significance level α= 5%. The sample was composed by 448 older people, to which 70,8% were women with the average age of 71,77 (±8,02) years old, 34,6% of the older people showed a positive tracking to depressive symptoms. The final model showed that there was no association between telomeric length and depressive symptomatology,  2 (7,N=448) = 54,96, p <0,0001, even envisaging variants such as age, gender, multimorbidity, education and physical activities. The current study did not identify associations between leukocyte telomere length and depressive symptoms in older people. These results show that specific aging profiles may reflect a selective survivorship, precluding the tracking of the relationship between telomere length and depressive symptoms.