ASSOCIATION OF MOTHER’S BLOOD GROUP WITH CORD BLOOD RELATIVE TELOMERE LENGTH

ABSTRACT

Background:

Cord blood relative telomere length(RTL), the biological chronometer which can determine life span, has been found highly variable at birth due to fetal programming under the influence of different risk factors and markers of biological aging. This study was designed to compare RTL of maternal and new born and its association with blood groups of mothers as well as other related maternal and new born parameters.

Methods:

Maternal and cord RTL’s were measured in 250 samples using a quantitative real-time PCR method. Correlation was used to check the association of maternal and cord blood RTL. Kruskal Wallis was used to examine the comparison of cord blood RTL with maternal demographics.

Results:

Maternal mean age (Mean±S.D) was 27.17± 5.11 and paternal mean age was 34.03 ± 4.90. Maternal and cord RTL showed 0.01 level of significance at 95% confidence level. Cord blood RLT kilo base pair (kbp) (6.76± 1.35) was higher than maternal RTL (6.43± 1.35).Maternal blood groups were distributed highest (n=84, 33%) as B+ve and the lowest (n=1, 0.4%) as B-ve. Regarding maternal telomere length the longest was (6.68 ±1.34) in A+ve group and A-ve had the smallest length 5.32 ±0.95, however the results were not statistically significant (0.134). On contrary cord blood RTL was longest in O-ve blood group, 6.95±0.56and smallest in B-ve 5.41 RTL with p-value 0.159.

Conclusion:

Cord Blood RLT was higher than in maternal blood in target population of Karachi, Pakistan. The longest maternal RTL was in A+ve and smallest in O+ve cord blood. Majority of mothers were B+ve followed by O+ve.

Key words:

Telomere; Cord Blood; Blood groups; Parity; Gravidity.

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