# Telomeres and Female Fecundity

> **NIH NIH R01** · RBHS-NEW JERSEY MEDICAL SCHOOL · 2020 · $622,776

## Abstract

SUMMARY 
Women with delayed menopause and those who give birth to children later in life show less
cardiovascular disease and live longer than other women. Women with constitutively long
leukocyte telomere length (LTL) have delayed menopause, show less cardiovascular disease
and also live longer than other women. The central hypothesis of this proposal is a logical
extension of these findings. It posits that women who bear children later in life without the use of
assisted reproductive technologies might have a constitutively long LTL. A corollary of this
hypothesis is that offspring of these women might have a long LTL as well, given that LTL is
highly heritable. Moreover, children born to older women are typically conceived by older men.
As the offspring's LTL is positively associated with paternal age at the time of conception of the
offspring, LTL of offspring conceived by older women might be constitutively longer than
average due to the joint effects of heritability of a longer LTL from the mothers and being
conceived by older fathers. This central hypothesis and its corollary will be tested in the
Norwegian Mother and Child Cohort Study (MoBa) ─ a pregnancy and birth cohort with a
Biobank of leukocyte DNA samples and a comprehensive dataset. The aims of the study are: 1)
measure LTL in 1700 mothers who gave birth at ages 18 years or older, including 1000 mothers
who gave birth at the age 35 years and older; 2) measure LTL in 300 mothers who gave birth at
the age of 35 years and older with the aid of in-vitro fertilization; 3) measure LTL in the 2,000
fathers (the sexual partners) of the mothers in aims 1 and 2); and 4) measure LTL in newborns
of these parents and perform an instrumental variable analysis, further exploring the relationship
between maternal LTL and fecundity. Learning about LTL using the mother-father-newborn
study design will broaden our understanding of the familial framework of female fecundity and of
having long (and short) LTL. This understanding is vital for public health, given that LTL is
associated with a host of aging-related disorders and with longevity in contemporary humans.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 9838266
- **Project number:** 5R01HL134840-04
- **Recipient organization:** RBHS-NEW JERSEY MEDICAL SCHOOL
- **Principal Investigator:** ABRAHAM AVIV
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $622,776
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2016-12-15 → 2021-11-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9838266

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 9838266, Telomeres and Female Fecundity (5R01HL134840-04). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-25 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/9838266. Licensed CC0.

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