telomere length & heart disease

2025, first author, northwestern / masala study

i'm first author on a study asking whether telomere length, a marker of biological aging, is linked to early heart disease in south asians living in america. we used data from the masala cohort and looked at telomere length against coronary artery calcium and carotid artery thickness.

my part was the analysis: categorizing telomere length into tertiles and running the regression models, adjusted for demographic, clinical and behavioral risk factors.

what we found: shorter telomeres looked linked to more atherosclerosis at first, but the association disappeared once we adjusted for age. so telomere length was not an independent predictor here, which points at other biological and environmental drivers behind the high heart-disease burden in south asians.

co-authored with researchers at northwestern, ucsf and harvard.

status: manuscript, mediators of atherosclerosis in south asians living in america (masala) study.