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Our final clip of Elizabeth Blackburn, recorded at the recent EMBO 2010 meeting in Barcelona. Here, Professor Blackburn talks about the possible mechanisms that link telomere length to cardiovascular disease.

F1000: What potential (molecular) mechanism could link telomeres and cardiovascular disease?

Liz Blackburn (paraphrased):

One of the things we’ve been looking at is the effect of chronic stress on the length of telomeres.

A great deal of work has tied the state of immune system and inflammatory properties with certain types of CVDs. So it’s not unreasonable to think there might be some causality: if the immune system is ‘running out’, getting senescent—as evidenced by telomeres getting shorter—this will eventually limit the cell’s ability to proliferate.

Also as the immune system gets more pro-inflammatory in terms of the cytokines it secretes, we think there may be a linkage there and that would probably be something one could tease out.