Type 1 diabetes linked to earlier signs of blood-cell aging
An observational study found a marker of blood-cell aging in 4.40% of participants with type 1 diabetes versus 3.00% of controls.
Limit: Average white-blood-cell telomere length did not differ between diabetes and control groups
Edited by Boris Djordjevic · AgingResearch.News
An observational study analyzed 416,565 UK Biobank participants, including 1,342 with type 1 diabetes, for signs of blood-forming cell aging. Researchers assessed expanding groups of blood cells sharing mutations and measured telomeres, the protective DNA ends, in white blood cells.
Age modeling suggested an approximately seven-year earlier shift in the likelihood of finding these cell groups in diabetes. Average telomere length did not differ significantly between groups, but longer diabetes duration was linked to shorter telomeres. Within type 1 diabetes, shorter telomeres were associated with past heart attacks and new heart attacks over a median follow-up of approximately 13.5 years. The blood-cell groups sharing mutations were not significantly associated with heart attacks or coronary artery disease, which affects the arteries supplying the heart.
Why it matters
People with type 1 diabetes face excess heart disease risk that traditional risk factors do not fully explain. The authors implicated telomere changes as a contributor to that risk.
Caveats
The observational links cannot establish whether telomere shortening caused heart attacks. The findings concern type 1 diabetes, not type 2, and the preprint has not been peer-reviewed.
- Telomere
- Telomerase and telomere maintenance
- Type 1 diabetes
- Telomere length
- Coronary artery disease
- Humans
The paper
Accelerated hematopoietic aging in type 1 diabetes links telomere attrition to myocardial infarction
Yale University
medRxiv, May 17, 2026, Open access, CC BY-NC-ND, Preprint, not peer-reviewed
